Pieces

(It’s a coincidence that this piece is called “Pieces”. It was originally posted 01/31/2012, as a first-person present-tense snippet from A War of Bones, inspired by Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge “The Present Tense”)

“You…” he whispers, as the life leaves him.

“Yes.”

I do not say more than this, for he has already lingered longer than the others who’d come here in the days after. He is of their kind, they who herded our own away from us. Marched or dragged them up the road and down the hill into the forest before they murdered the trees. Thunderoak, butterberry, waterwillow, martle, none we could see were kept aside from saw or axe or flame or spiked poison. With them died the remembers.

All sad we were, through sun to sun the first day, and smaller hours after, haze crawling into nights of no stars, just smoke and unraveled spirits.

All sad we were. All sad, Nama and Jesa and me. We held together in the mud of the Bayson’s alow and watched what we could. We stared hard, stayed fast until we could not stand, and got up when we should have stayed seated, but when all was done, it was not enough. Jesa and me, our blood was too thin even to keep our own father’s shade to ground. And Nama’s was non … Nama’s was all their blood.

‘Oze, it was square she grudged it. Even if it had put us in the alow, and not forgotten dead beneath the slaughtered wood.

Their lead was a man like a slab of wall, one Teganor. He had known Nama afore. He had known her more than she would let be. I knew this even though I was too young to be told such things.

‘Lady Lisaly,’ he said to her. ‘My men and I are at your service.’

‘How kind of you,’ Nama replied. ‘Now that you have bereft me of mine.’

He smiled at this, and took her pretty chin in his blackened fingers. The mail around them smelled as much of blood as it did ash. Our blood, proper. Father’s char stained her perfect skin.

She did not slap him.

I di … I punched him, hard enough to break his own blood out from the cage of his nose. And when he was stepping back staggering, clasping his face, I kicked him. And again. And again.

Jesa screamed my name.

The rest, I do not remember. Perhaps I will, in days to come, days nearer now than they were the day before.

This one had scavenged my other foot from the village ruins. I pluck it from his bag with the hand that the one before him had found, and fit it back where it belongs. I have a knife, but his is better. I take it, and cut from him enough flesh to cover my bird-cleaned bone.  It is darker than what swathes my legs and other foot, but no matter.  A skirt and stocking and shoes can hide much.

In time, my pieces will all be fit true beneath this lie of skin, and I will walk wholly as their kind among their holds and hearths. Those will burn, then, and our trees will grow from their ashes.

(07/22/2011, in response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: That’s Right, I Said “Unicorn”.)

The cat threw himself out about a month ago. The weather warmed up, and I guess he remembered he was a great hunter, not just a menace to computer cables. He freaked out one morning, sliced through my forearm — fucking scratch scarred — and went out the screen door. I’ll admit I might have helped a little. I don’t like to bleed.

He was gone for a week or two, then sauntered back, idly scratching at the fleas he’d picked up and harboring godknowswhatelse in his fur. There’s Lyme Disease here. West Nile. Catholics. No way was he bringing any of that shit into my house. Did I mention I still have a scar?

He tried clawing his way back in through the screen door. I dumped a party cup of water on his head.

Since then, he’s been trying to bribe his way back in. Bringing me presents.

Everybody I mention this to thinks it’s cute. If I get one more crack from my crazy cat lady mother about it, I’m going to mail her the next goddamned dead chipmunk I find on the porch. Or maybe a possum. Pretty sure I could find a box big enough to hold one of the possums the cat’s left me.  Tie some yarn to its tail, and hey, look, Mom, it’s a balloon!

She’d probably try to have me locked up. That is, if the folks at the Inspector General’s office didn’t report me to News of the Weird.

So, yeah, not telling anybody about the unicorn. Or, well, part of a unicorn. The horn, mostly, with some bits of hair and skin and shriveled up dangly things that are probably blood vessels. I admit I gave it a good looking over before I chucked it into this trash bag. It’s not every day I get to see a unicorn horn. Correction, there’s not any day I should be seeing a unicorn horn. Between you and me, I’m not looking forward to seeing the rest of it either. It’d make more sense for me not to be out here in the woods behind my place, huh?  I agree.  But the last thing I need is somebody else to find the rest of it and come knocking on my door.

Hey, lady, you know you’ve got a dead unicorn on your property?

Why would I have a dead unicorn on my property?  And why are you on my property? Damn hunters. Can’t you read?  Big Orange Signs. No Tres-Pass-Ing. Beware of Grumpy Broad with Internet Access and Friends with Not-So-Hidden Liberal Agendas.  Do you really want to wind up on YouTube?

Ah, damn it … not finding anything. This is not good. What’s worse is, I’m usually really good at finding things. The trick is to be quiet while you’re looking, no word of lie. Things make noise, especially when they’re trying to stay hid. Hey, I’m not talking Zen or some shit like that, it’s true! Mostly true, anyway.

Maybe I should wait until the sun finishes coming up. Not that I want to: that’s when my stupid neighbor starts mowing his yard. He’s from New York. Queens or Brooklyn or one of those other places where people don’t have yards. I don’t know, and I don’t want to ask. He and his wife moved out here three years ago, and bam, first thing he did was buy a riding lawn mower. He’s on it from sun up to sun down, every damn day when we don’t have snow on the ground. Never thought I’d be grateful for snow.

He hates snow. Hates nature. Bitches at me about the wildflowers in my yard and the trees out back. You look like you’re too busy to mow your yard. Want me to swing over and do it? Could rent something and get rid of those shit trees for you. Eh, yeah, thanks, but no thanks.  I like things like they are, despite the Lyme Disease and West Nile. I haven’t mentioned the Catholics to him. I think he might be one. Hard to tell these days.

Never seen his wife. My neighbor down the road thinks she might be who’s feeding all of the stray cats. Probably pisses her husband off.

I wish she’d do a better job of feeding the one that used to be mine.

It occurs to me, as I head back toward the house … no, that’d be mean.

I think about it anyway. Yeah, not nice.

Sun’s just about up, but the lights aren’t yet on next door.

Being quiet’s good for other things, too.

There isn’t enough room in the kitchen garbage for the empty trash bag. Great. I hate it when I have to empty the garbage when I just have to throw away one thing. But I do, you know? Otherwise, crap’d just get stuck to the underside of the trashcan lid, and I don’t know if Lysol can kill dead unicorn germs.

I do know now that they don’t sparkle. Guess that means there’s some justice in the world, or whatever good exists to counter the existence of My Little Pony.

So, garbage. Right.  Need to deal with that. Dealing with…

Huh?

There’s my neighbor, right on schedule, heading out to his shed to get the lawn mower. Guess he hasn’t noticed what was on the back step.

He’s got my ex-cat, swinging it by its tail. Cat hasn’t been dead long enough to balloon.

My neighbor’s shed sits right up against my property line.  When he gets there, he flings the cat into the trees.

“Hey!”

Maybe it’s not a good idea to bang on the window. Oops.

My neighbor turns, waves at me, and points to his forehead. Can see the scratch from here. It starts up on the top of his shiny head and wow, cat damn near got his right eye. Fucker’s definitely going to scar.

“Thanks!” he yells.

“You’re welcome!”

Hey, c’mon, what else can I say?

(I used to write fan fiction. I didn’t start doing that on purpose: I converted interactions from roleplaying game sessions into story form to help me remember what had gone on, and shared them with other players to sanity-check my recollections. The sharing went from email chains to LiveJournal posts to collaborative, then solo Blogspot/Blogger sites … and then I got better, kinda. I at least got busy enough getting paid to create technical foo and write about it to have zero mental energy for other kinds of writing, even for fun.

Some of the fan fiction pieces I was able to scrub enough to get published via conventional, albeit fringe, platforms. This one, originally posted on the very much defunct Crux Meander (an EvE Online fiction site), I tidied up to throw in with my old technical proposal writing portfolio as a palate cleanser.)

The corridor was empty. The air was still. Stale, once Lon had gotten far enough from the raw smells of the fresh corpse that was now jamming his cell door open.

There were no other cells. No doors or branching corridors. There was nothing else for a while but white tile; smooth floor and seamless walls and dimly glowing ceiling. All of the empty surfaces were curved together as if they’d been molded as a single piece, dropped into place and forgotten about, just like he’d been. The soles of his bare feet were soon coated with fine grey dust.

No alarms were going off, at least not here. Perhaps they were somewhere else. It made sense to him that there should be an alarm. Why wouldn’t there be?

He couldn’t judge how far or for how long he walked until he reached the thick round door at the end of the corridor. It wasn’t an airlock. At least there weren’t the warnings plastered on it that should have been if it was, and the manufacturers had been the responsible sort who understood that not everyone had the training or instincts to tell them when they were just across a threshold from instant death.

Lon found his observation amusing in a number of different ways, so he stood there and laughed at each of those ways for a little while. Or at least it seemed like a little while. It could have been longer.

The door didn’t want to open. It also lacked an obvious way to force it ajar. He pounded on it with the butt of the gun he didn’t remember taking from the corpse, because shooting it would have been just slightly more stupid than shooting himself in the head, and I’ve gone too damned far to…

“…in here!” someone shouted from outside.

The lock cycled open. Arms caught him. Someone took his gun away, carefully.

“Easy, sir,” that person mumbled, reassuringly, while others pulled him in and picked him up. No one asked him why he started laughing again, or wondered if he’d actually stopped.

He couldn’t see faces. They didn’t have them, just like the body on the threshold of his cell hadn’t had a face. It’d just been meat in a black uniform.

This was all Navy meat.

Or he’d just walked into space, and his dying brain was trying to reassure him that he made the right decision.

Lon smiled into the light that swallowed him.