@ilsa-of-drentha made me write this because of a 4am note she made about lobster amulets. My fellow writers are great people.
“On an Island”
On an island in the wide blue-green sea there lived a people who worshipped the Sea-Goddess and her kin. Their lives were begun in the salt lagoons on the leeward side of the island where the sun warmed the shallow waters and the breeze was gentler and mothers came to birth their children into the pools rimmed with algae and bottomed in carefully tended sand.
Their clothes were of sea-grasses and the scales of fishes and the skins of the sea mammals and the feathers of the sea birds. Their meat came likewise from those animals, and their small light gathering-craft and their cumbersome fishing-craft to stalk and spear and net their prey were cleverly done up with driftwood and seaweed and, folks on the mainland would say, long after the sea-folk had all drowned, a touch of magic. For how else does a boat float in waves so high as those around the island without some charm to protect it?
The sea-folk worshipped their Sea-Goddess who gave all life and who took it, and they wore as amulets against her wrath and trickery (for the sea is a harsh mistress and not given to sentiment) bits of seaweed or scales from deep-sea fishes to trick her into recognizing them not as creatures of land who she might wantonly destroy but as fellow beings of the deep blue-green waves.
Their life was not idyllic there on a small island alone in the great sea but they were happy, for who is not happy when she has nothing more to covet? The sea provided, and the sea took, and they lived and fished and were born and died and celebrated the blue-green depths and white-capped waves and wove seaweed into their hair and imagined themselves alone in the world.
Sometimes the sea-fog would come in and they would be alone indeed for days or weeks in a cloudy, echoing wilderness that swallowed people whole and, worse, did not always spit them back out. Often wild storms came up out of nowhere and took whole boats to the bottom, washed the fish huts off the far rocks and dredged old wreckage up to lay it on the beaches in return.
But mostly people learned to survive with the sea and became complacent with it. And generations passed and slowly the water rose or the island sank and no one really knew which but one day a woman whose home had once been many steps from the shore came out to greet the sea and found it at her door, and the whole island realized what a danger they were in.
And among them sprang up a following who were more zealous than the rest, who saw that despite the amulets of seaweed, the sea was not satisfied. And they found a leader, a man who had survived a great storm by clutching in both hands the shellfish cages he had just pulled from the depths, cages which held live lobsters which also survived the storm and floated back to shore with him. So they concluded that dead and dried objects from the sea were ineffective. So they preached a new doctrine to the island.
The water will rise, and the island will sink, and the sea will reclaim everything she has given us.
But we will survive who carry with us life. We will be granted life under the waves.
I discovered this almost-joke saved in my phone, today. I think I woke up at 4 AM to write it, and it made sense at the time? But then my friend turned it into a beautiful story about life on an island threatened by sea level rise, and it’s gorgeous, and they are amazing, and this is why you always need to wear your lobster amulet.
Lincoln has a lot to say about Metallica. Which he fucking better well because he’s got Dell in the automotive equivalent of a full nelson - on a high July heatstroke of a Monday, in sphincter-tight traffic, air conditioning wussing out the vents. Dell wouldn’t get six feet if he bailed - he’d de-shape like a butter pat and end up a blot of bubbly flesh on the asphalt. But there will be much to discuss about Metallica, much indeed - and Lincoln produces thoughts with such agility and flavor that Dell’s resentment settles at the sump.
The story of the Metal Up Your Ass pressings is nearing the denouement; Dell unslumps, avoiding the gasrange window. The plug ahead is an empty construction patch, an entire unsullied lane roped off with carrot-colored plastic stumps. “Do you know anyone who works construction?” asks Dell. Lincoln finishes his sentence and clearly plans to begin another - Dell scoops the moment. “Do you know anyone who works construction?”
Lincoln allows a “nahdude” and continues. Dell, unfazed, reclaims the air and continues. “Because we should know someone who works construction. It is so hugely a moneymaker in this county. I was a kid who thought that when I grew up they’d be finished with the construction. Which is dumbshit thinking but it’s not just because stuff breaks but because it’s a moneymaker.”
“I know,” says Lincoln. “City contracts are gluetraps for lawyers and mob dudes. Everyone knows that.”
“Con law people know that,” says Dell.
Lincoln snorks, a zing of mucus in his skull. “You should go to law school. You’ll see how stuff works. So says my uncle.”
A burning oil derrick in Dell’s guts - buffalo chicken tenders and burnt coffee. Dell can feel his body softening. No ready and cheap access to a gym, and the roads of his hometown taunt his gasping ass when he jogs them, gravelly noodles that drain him brutally. Running the grid of the city was checklisted deadline. Suburbs are melting him from inside and out.
Forms of ingress into a location with unknown hostiles and/or civilians are divided into two types: warm and cold.
Cold ingress points rely on externalized sourcing; blueprints, visual surveillance, and any intel we can gather from locals if it’s a residence. We work up a complete outside profile - there’s not a single hole or seam visible that we don’t work into our planning. You’ll know the obvious - doors, windows, skylights, chimneys, vents, and the odd ventilation shaft - but the subtle cold ingress points are the trickiest, and the most rewarding if you like tricky, which I very much do.
Consider,par example, a scrounged blueprint that indicates an addition was build on within the last few years. Say we do our research and discover that there’s no insulation in the addition - maybe they couldn’t decide between fiberglass or blown cellulose or maybe they’re just short on liquidity or motivation - and what this tells us is that there’s a cold ingress point in the space behind the drywall. Not large enough for a human (or at least not one that’s legal to employ for the hours we’d need her) but large enough for a directional mic with a thermal sensing feed and who knows, maybe a directional charge. That’s how you make a door in less than three seconds. Try to hit a cold ingress point with a battering ram and it’ll take three seconds, assuming there’s nobody on the other side. Impossible to detect the heat signature unless you’ve got the sensor on the door, and any location that we put this much calories into crafting the perfect breach will have at least one shitty camera trained smack on that door. Know when to make a door. Measure twice, cut once.
Warm ingress points are cold ingress points that for become viable for their minimal obstacles and time sensitivity. Say the loading dock is unmanned during shift change, only two minutes a week but that’s the chance. Maybe the side office is closed while the manager takes a vacation - once every three years. Maybe the sunlight hits the north face of the bank building on November 18th at 2:13 PM and dazzles the entire block like disco. Warm ingress points are like the boy in high school you never considered viable until a few years later, when you’re riding that hometown bar into the witching hour, and he shows up all cute and airy and well-dressed as if all the work you passed on putting into him got picked up by some other nobler girl. The warm ingress point and you may not work out, but the golden window is there. You will laugh about the three things you both held onto from school - the molest-y teacher, the stolen trophies, the mold. will You drink in a livid sort of joy. You will toss off his mention of a girlfriend. You will breach him.
Let’s start with your results. The Enneagram, Zodiac, and MBTI Section revealed that you are either an 8w9, or an 8w4, a Gemini, and an INFP-T. From Your Disorder Section come the results that you are physically disabled with a potassium channelopathy, an illness that nobody would ever bother to try and understand, as well as mentally disabled with depression, ADHD, autism, and you are quite possibly an actual narcissist. In one of your written responses, you said, “Apparently I have a desire to control the circumstances around me. I’m told. I guess that’s true. I guess. I mean, the desire is there. I’m not, like, puppeteering people around. But anyway, I don’t ever feel that way because I want to be, like, manipulative, or cruel. It just helps me feel safe. To imagine that I can. Not puppeteer people, no, I mean ‘to imagine that I can have some control.’ So much is uncontrollable, overwhelming.” Aw, how cute. You do use too many words to over-express your meaning, though. And sometimes you still aren’t making any sense, even though you talk way too much. Your Preferences and Hobbies Section gives me an interesting note to write down on my clipboard here; most of them are actually just coping mechanisms and tools for escapism. Your Relationships Section reveal that your Attachment Style is Anxious, but somehow with the ridiculous amount of actual love of Secure mixed in, meaning you fall in love too early and can’t let go. Your Love Language is Physical Touch, with the runner-up being Quality Time. Coupled with your aforementioned ADHD; and your out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality, this means that if you aren’t within hugging distance of the person you have the ridiculous amount of love at all times, you lose interest within days, hours. You also desire praise and validation, not just from your friends, partners, and family, but from every single person you meet. You are highly insecure.
I’m so sorry, but after looking over your results from the extensive Personality Test, your diagnosis is unlovable.
Nobody will ever be able to reciprocate what you give so much of.
Nobody will ever be able to tolerate you for longer than a month. That is your final record.
I told myself this before I had pulled the blinds down, leaving the room drenched in an artificial darkness. I sat on the cold, half-tiled floor of our bathroom. They were words I would repeat over and over in an attempt to make them stick. Felix tried to help. After all, he was the one who instilled the theory of halves in me. He sat, slumped, back pushed against the door I had hastily locked when I tore into the bathroom.
L'ÉPHÉMÈRE REVIEW: ISSUE VII: CREPÚSCULO Where anything and everything can happen.
Written for this week’s @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt: “setting heaven on fire” (inspired also by Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which I’ve been studying at uni recently)
Word Count: 242
“Why should a king be subject to a priest?
Proud Rome…
I’ll fire thy crazèd buildings, and enforce
The papal towers to kiss the lowly ground!”
- Christopher Marlowe, Edward II(Act I, Scene IV)
The torches blazed in their sconces, casting flickers of flame across the walls of the castle hall where the King paced restlessly. The ghost of a kiss lingered on his lips like the remnants of a bittersweet poison. His favourite, his heart, his everything - banished,cast asunder across an endless grey expanse of sea.That one word, banished,weighed heavier upon him than the loss of a thousand kingdoms ever could.
All this, brought about by hands that claimed to be friends. Treasonous conspirators, all of them, the peers and the clergy both. Worst of all, they were happy. They reveled in his misery, in his loneliness, and for what? So that they might feel less insecure in their own fragile superiority?
The King sank down onto his throne and put his face in his hands. Slowly the crown, that heavy circlet of ruby and gold, slid from his head and clattered to the floor. What did it matter? What was it worth, to be the head of state, when the laws of God denied him the only chance of happiness that could be?
The torches blazed in their sconces, the fire reflected in the anger in his eyes as his despair hardened into resolve. He would have his beloved by his side once more, even if he had to set Heaven itself on fire to do it. Some might have called it sacrilege; others, blasphemy.
The Avengers were called in to face a pack of teenagers hopped up on magic mojo and redbull causing low-level mayhem and property damage in Greenwich Village. Doctor Strange took notice of what was happening down the block from his digs and stepped in to assist. This isn’t that story.
Loki was invited to the party cause he’s surprisingly good with the younger crowd and teleported in just as Strange cast a temporary forgetfulness spell in an effort to subdue the teens without actual harm.
Basically Loki took a friendly-fire hit so I could play with the Amnesia Trope. Got it? Good, here we go. (1k)
Outside of Vegas I found the place. I parked and sat in the cold and waited. A coyote sat in the dark watching, waiting with me. From nowhere and everywhere we heard her song in the sand. The Pisces sang from her ancient grave. And we sang along.
Humans are the only species in the universe with concepts of hatred and vengeance, and this is what makes us so warlike. The galactic council’s decision to punish us for exceeding their arbitrary “population cap” backfires HORRIBLY because of this.
“I surrendered,” Commander Mag says. He’s been saying those two words over and over again since his capture two hours ago. He rubs his antennae together, desperately not looking at the smoldering wreck of his ship floating just outside the station’s viewing deck. “I surrendered.”
None of the humans guarding him have even spoken to him. He doesn’t recognize the expressions on their mobile faces— that wasn’t on any of the flash cards given to him when the humans first joined the federation. They look still, like their flesh has hardened into exoskeleton. Their eyes gleam when they look at him.
He doesn’t know why it unsettles him so much. He wants to fly away, but his wings are bound much like all three sets of his thoracic arms. That’s another new thing – he did not know the humans had built devices like this, shackles and bonds strong enough to accommodate his species’ anatomy.
A flash of memory: Laser canons strong enough to tear through his ship’s shields and the horrible sound of ripping metal as their attackers latched onto the exterior hull and torethrough it. Who could have known the humans capable of such savage interstellar warfare? Who could have foreseen?
The doors in front of him slide open and the human Captain strides in. He doesn’t know her name, but he recognizes her from the brief message she’d transmitted to him before the attack. Commander Mag feels his unease slide away. Finally someone of adequate rank to understand that he surrendered!
“I surrendered—“
“Yes, I’ve heard,” the captain says. She strides toward him, her footsteps oddly heavy for a being half his size. She stops in front of where he’s been forced to kneel. Her eyes, like her crew’s, glitter. “I suppose you want my thanks.”
Commander Mag’s mandibles click. “I want nothing but what I am owed. Release me as per council regulation—“
A human from behind him makes a harsh and barking noise. Then, as the captain continues to stare at Mag, another human makes the same noise, chest heaving. Then another and another until the deck is filled with that awful barking sound. He has always seen the humans as soft, their flesh hardly sturdy enough to protect their vulnerable, meaty insides. But this sound is hard and biting in a way Mag has never heard before. It chills something in Mag and he tries to speak, to demand they stop, only to find his vocal mechanics are paralyzed from fear.
The captain raises one hand and the humans fall silent. She’s baring her teeth at him in an expression that Mag remembers as smile. A friendly, happy gesture.
It is very, very wrong.
“Your council,” the captain says, “killed over twenty percent of Earth’s population.” She studies him. “Did you think you would be allowed to surrender after your part in the genocide?”
Mag’s mind goes blank. Allowed to surrender? Allowed? “You war was unsanctioned. It is only by the grace of the council that they entertained a surrender—”
“Let’s just kill him, Captain Simran,” a crewmember standing behind Mag interrupts. From the tone of voice, this is the one who laughed first. He steps around Mag, glaring, and comes up alongside the captain. “He won’t understand.”
“Stand down, First Officer Blanche,” the captain says. But she doesn’t move to reprimand him further, even stepping slightly to one side so that the human man can stand in front of Mag with her. “We have our orders.”
Kill him? Mag clicks his mandibles. “As per council regulation, once a formal surrender has been accepted all participating parties are to cease hostilities—”
“Yourcouncil regulations,” Captain Simran says. She doesn’t flinch as Mag hisses in frustration at the second interruption. “After the Council’s…lackluster decision to cull our population, Earth has agreed to go in a different direction.” Her eyes flash. “Yourcouncil is currently facing the same situation as you.”
First Officer Blanche’s eyes drift out the viewing window where the last of Commander Mag’s ship’s light have finally gone dark.
Mag feels his hearts pounding in his chest, so loud that they can be heard buzzing outside his body. “Ridiculous! The Council won’t fall to inferior species’—”
“Commander Mag of Merstilan, you have been found guilty of seventeen separate war crimes,” Captain Simran says.
“All of my actions were sanctioned–!”
“The full list of your crimes shall be made available to you upon request,” she continues as if he’s not speaking.
Enraged, Mag struggles against his bonds. “I am not a criminal! The surrender was processed!”
“Thank you,” Captain Simran says, “for sparing the millions of lives on your home planet, Merstilan. Thatis what your surrender bought. However, someone must pay for the millions of human lives lost.”
“A life for a life,” First Officer Blanche says. His lip curls in an expression Mag abruptly remembers as contempt. “Surely you must understand that.”
“I do not,” Mag says. His six eyes dart from the captain, to the first officer, all around the deck to the various crew standing guard. No, not standing guard. Spectating. They’re here to spectate his death. “The consequence for murdering a sanctioned agent of the Council—”
“It is a shame you have one life to lose for the millions you slaughtered,” the captain observes. She doesn’t seem to notice Mag’s thrashing or the panicked pitch of his beating hearts. She pulls a pistol from her belt. “It will have to be enough.”
“The war is over!” Mag bellows. He recognizes that pistol. Its ammo is strong enough to cut through steel. His exoskeleton won’t stand a chance. “There is no need for further loss of life!”
“There is need,” Captain Simran says. She brings the weapon up to point between his eyes. Her face is frozen into that mask-like expression, her eyes gleaming. “Your death will only satiate a part of that need. Goodbye, Commander.”
Captain Simran of Earth pulls the trigger.
—–.
Thanks for reading this little sci fi piece! If you want to read stories like this or my other stories a week before they’re posted on Tumblr, please check out my Patreon linked below!
Next week’s story is based on this prompt (X) by@writing-prompt-s :The Chosen One is dead, killed while facing the Dark Lord. Grief and hatred together give rise to an unlikely pair of heroes who come together to defeat the evil now taking over the world unchecked. The Chosen One’s parents are out for revenge, and there is no room for mercy anymore.
Sitting down to eat some cake, he instead found himself idly staring at a spot on the table while tapping the fork against his skull over and over again. He’d found the perfect way to do it to make the same pinging sound with every strike.
He kept this up for a good few minutes. His head didn’t even hurt.
What time was it? This was the real question. Routine was that I had to be out of bed by six to get ready to go to work. Closer to six, the worse I’d feel about having woken up.
One or two in the morning? Fine, go back to sleep, another four or five hours. Bliss. A real treat.
Three or four? Less good but not awful. That’s a good nap there, at least. Won’t be rested but won’t be shattered. I can take that.
Five? Really not great. An hour is barely sleeping at all, especially since it’ll take a not-insignificant slice of that hour to get to sleep in the first place. Could be worse, but not what I’d choose.
Anything else? Awful.
I brace myself. Savour the darkness, the possibility of going back to sleep. I reach for my phone and bring it over. I check the time.
“I can’t believe you’d ever associate with that - with that CRIMINAL and his FILTHY MONEY!” My opponent said, wagging a finger under my nose.
Before I could reply to this a rasping giggle distracted me, and I noticed a shadowy, oozing figure crouching in the corner delicately caressing what appeared to be a skull.
“Uh, who’s that guy?” I asked, pointing.
My opponent turned briefly to glance at the corner, but apparently didn’t see anything they hadn’t expected to see as they turned back unruffled.
“Them? Friend of mine. Don’t change the subject,” they said.
I blinked.
“They’re your friend and you’re chewing me out?”
As I asked this, the figure crawled over on five limbs that could have been either legs or arms (it was hard to say) and put a rusted coin into the waiting palm of the person I was talking to. They took this coin without comment and pocketed it.
“You just took his money!” I cried.
“So? They’re fine! Don’t change the subject!”
“It’s rusty from the blood of innocents,” the figure hissed, happy as anything.
“They’refine,” insisted my opponent.
I felt there was a strange standard in operation here.
We asked them if they’d ever considered just stopping, and they were quiet for a very long time. Such a long time we thought maybe they hadn’t heard us. We were about to ask again when they finally replied.
