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Signal 617 words "Has anyone seen Claire?" "Couldn't keep up with him, you see. Not intellectually and certainly not sexually." "So I said, what the cook told me was that she never let him so much as touch her." "That's not what you heard downstairs." "Does anyone know where the girlie with those pigs in a blanket went off to? I could murder a couple of those right now." "Mostly just lies there. I'm sorry." "Pink hair! With long blue bangs that had to have her blind as a Chinese bat! Of course, I asked to speak with her manager." "Blood." "Now, Fallen's idea of a swinger orgy was just having everyone in the neighborhood gently caress their own wife in the same room." "Six percent return per annum just won't cut it these days, so I-" "You insufferable little, little... piglet!" "Did Marie just throw a drink in Marv's face? I thought that only happened in movies." "Always seemed like a waste of perfectly good alcohol." "I'm sure Marie was sensible enough to use the cheap stuff." "Now that would make for a proper party. Get everyone out in t-shirts and jeans, armed with low-end martinis and let them have at it. Hand them a towel, and back in the line they go." "What was that?" "The boy couldn't keep down a job at a record store. Do I need to tell you anything more about him? You have to blame the mother, of course." "That's definitely blood." "You can't go wrong with leather. A good, solid strap." "Does anyone have the key to the rear ground floor bathroom?" "Have you ever seen that movie? The one with Bugs Bunny playing basketball?" "I mean I'd drive a Prius, but I wouldn't want people to think that I was, well, the sort of person that drives one." "If you really want to see, we could head to my condo. You know, after. Or if you're not that patient, there's always the coat closet." "I think Claire had the key. Has anyone seen her?" "Bust it down, just one solid thump will do it-" "God, Nathan, don't embarrass yourself. Let me by. I used to date a guy in college whose dad was a locksmith." "That's a distressingly large amount of blood." "Six different rooms, and I still had to deal with those creak-creak-creak sounds out of the air conditioner every thirty minutes. Like clockwork." "Okay, nobody should go in there." "Shouldn't someone call the police?" "I called my lawyer and he'll call the police." "What did you see in there?" "I need a bucket. Now!" "Don't watch. They say it's contagious. Like sneezing." "Or poverty, am I right?" "Oh do shut up Norman." "What did-oh God, is it Claire?" "No. It was, it was, it was Fallen. And his, his, his-" "Spit it out, girl." "Not the best choice of words, love." "Shut up." "He was naked. And gutted like a turkey. And his, his you-know was sticking right out of his forehead like he was some kind of unicorn." "It really isn't funny, is it?" "I mean, it shouldn't be. But I have to know. What about his balls?" "Dangling right over his left eye. God, what's wrong with me?" "The police won't be here for about an hour." "I wonder how he got it to stick." "She, surely." "You think it's Claire?" "Well, she isn't here, right? Probably halfway to Mexico or France or wherever people go, West Cayman." "That's for money, not people." "I don't know. Someone would have seen her go, and her car's still parked outside." "Super-glue. I mean, that's what I'd- what any reasonable person would use to stick a severed penis onto a forehead."
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Dec 16, 2019 02:56
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| # ¿ Jan 25, 2026 09:35 |
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In, I'll take the reaction for 200
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Dec 16, 2019 22:44
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Rhymes With Spiral Prompt: Sharpless Expoxidation 1199 words I can't say I wasn't warned. By my Gran, of course. My Mum's wonderful, but she's got all the magic of a bucket of bleach. Gran, though, she was a proper witch, and she saw it in me, right round when she was near to passing and me near to going into high school. She gave me three pieces of advice. "Never get with a boy named Billy," she said. "Never tell someone you wouldn't die for what you can do, and for the love of the Mother, the Daughter, and all their wayward kin, never try to work at mirror magic." There's a certain kind of girl, not unrelated to the kind who has the right sort of granite-hard will that make for a serious witch, who's going to look at advice like that as less of a warning and more of a life plan. But let's be honest: I was lost about thirty minutes after meeting Will Clover. It was my first day, coming in after ten years of homeschooling, being the strange new kid with the name nobody knew how to spell. (It's Alyss.) And he did me a kindness, introducing me to new friends, all the while smiling a crooked smile beneath dark tousled hair. Then he took out the dagger, came round to Estelle. His girlfriend. The worst of it was that she was, well, cool. Kind, open, fun to know. She couldn't fit into the enemy-shaped box no matter how much I wanted to put her there. She, too, was a friend. Some time later things came to a head. A party, Will's birthday, a dozen or so kids, late into the evening. A game of secrets and challenges. Caylen, a blond boy who loved science and grapefruit, both beyond reason, was rude enough to mention the rumors about my family, ask me if they were true. "Are you really a witch?" I might have lied. I might have shaded the truth, said something about old religions and dangerous stereotypes. But I didn't. Drunk on sugar-water, attention and camaraderie, I told the truth, even gave demonstrations. On Estelle's urging, I took the game further. We dispensed with the challenges and made the truth binding. I charged a contract with aniseed and fire, and we bound each other to speak only pure and total truth for an hour. "It's only fair," she said. "We all know your biggest secret. You should know ours." We wasted the spell, to be honest. Learning trivial past misdeeds, old crushes they weren't half as secret as the holders thought. Nobody had any crimes more serious than shoplifting or driving unlicensed, no family secrets deeper than debt and struggles with bills and appearances. And when time came for me to tell on my feelings for William, he and Estelle were less than surprised. "If there were two of me," Will said, dismissive and wistful. "Could there be?" asked Estelle. Without the spell of truth it probably wouldn't have even occurred to me. But when I started talking about mirrors, I knew I was going to do it, warnings be damned. "Wait, you said it was forbidden," said Caylen. "That must be for a reason." But I was beyond listening to reason's voice. There was an enthusiasm spreading that was unstoppable. And I did not know the whys of the ban, so could not divulge them under the spell. We found a tall mirror, and had William stand before it. I invoked silver and lavender and a left-handed spiral. Will touched the mirror surface, clasped hands with his other self, and drew him through the glass. The other William was confused at first. He was silent as a reflection, had not yet learned to speak. But he could write, Will's own keen handwriting, perfectly reversed. At first we had to hold it up to the mirror to read it, until we learned the trick of reading backwards. William decided that we should call the other one Billy, to avoid confusion, and I was too busy with other feelings and the exhaustion of potent magic to object. Billy's smile was just the reverse of William's, crooked in the other direction. Billy liked me, right away. His kisses tasted like sour candy, like sweet tiny pain, like a rolling crackle of explosions. There was trouble, very soon. Billy couldn't eat food from our side. It just sat in his stomach and made him sicken. I could do the spell again, bring over a plateful, but it was hard work, too much to do every day. I went to Cayden for help. "You should send him back," he said. "Even if it weren't for this. There's something off about him." The boy had picked up a monster of a crush on me by then. I pushed. He understood the problem. He explained it to me. The molecules in real food weren't the same as their reflection, in ways that matter. You need words, proper words to make a spell. 'Enantiomer' was a science word, no good for spellwork. But 'chiral', that was proper, had the feel of the old words. Deasil. Widdershins. I learned to invoke sweeteners and pyramids, made a simple spell to flip a meal around, and things were good. For a while. William went out for football. That was the problem. The locker room at the field had a great big mirror, and William didn't appear in it. Most days the older students on the real team used that, and the gymnasium's room had fewer mirrors, was less perilous. But on game days for the junior league, they were in the real room, with that huge unavoidable mirror. "So if anyone notices who knows what will happen. Someone might take him for a vampire, put a stick through his heart," I said. Billy was skeptical, but we talked him around. I did the spell, sent him back behind the mirror, and the game went on. William lead us to victory over Crosswinds High. But Billy was angry when I brought him back. He sulked. He snapped. "Never again," he said. We fought. He seemed to give in. The next game day arrived. When I cast the spell, when the mirror shimmered clear and I lost all strength, he grabbed my arm, and pulled me with him. "I won't be in a world without you," he said. "My magic won't work there," I pleaded. "I'll be stuck forever." Billy smiled, and for the first time I saw the cruelty in that reversed crooked curl of the lip. He vanished, into the mirror, pulling on my hand. Caylen grabbed me, arms around my chest awkwardly, and pulled. My hand came free, and the mirror froze shut. My fingers are still reversed. I had to do the food spell quickly, to keep the tips from dying and rotting off, but that only swapped the molecules. My right hand's fingerprints spiral the wrong way, now. Caylen finally asked me out in Junior year, and we were together l, mostly, until graduation. We're at different colleges now, barely in touch, but I've had visions and augurs that our paths will cross and join again, eventually.
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Dec 22, 2019 23:06
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In with flash
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Dec 24, 2019 06:14
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Limits 858 words Prompt: addiction to strength There's something deeply satisfying about punching through a wall. The feel of shattering cinderblocks against knuckles... There's nothing like it except maybe the sound of steel ripping apart. Aftermath understood that. It's the one thing we ever had in common. I was the runt of the family, growing up. Paragon X, the kid who could barely lift a small car over my head while my brothers and sister were juggling houses. I had the rest of the family talents: I could fly, could barely be hurt, was fast as bad news. Just a little bit slower, a little bit sooner to cry mercy. Trip was a real jerk about it sometimes. A "just kidding" kind of guy, and mom and dad both bought into it every time. "You'll never be half as good as me," he whispered in my ear, just before he went with the rest of the family to spend a summer in the Hollow Moon. It was supposed to be a gentle try-out, me representing the Paragon legacy in Edge City, and if anything went wrong, well, there's always the Seven Saints and the Nexters, right? Except the Seven Saints got called out to the other side of the galaxy, and the Nexters picked that month to disband and scatter across the world to escape each other's drama. So when Malice showed up and started wrecking the city, there was just me. Well, me and Aftermath. Malice. I used to have nightmares about that one. A mix of leftover Nazi weapons, alien technology, and an artificial brain made of pure hate. The first time it showed up, in Berlin just after the war, grandfather died putting it down. So when Aftermath got in front of me, in her tattered leather suit with all the metal bands keeping it together and tells me "Wait, you're not strong enough to fight it," I was half thinking "Screw you, Trip," and half "You're right," but wound up just shrugging. "You'll need this," she said, and gave me my first power prop. A pair of gloves, iridescent bronze, just like the ones she wore. I put them on. I felt the strength flowing from them, into my arms. Into my heart. We launched ourselves at Malice, punched right through its chest and central cortex. It felt good. We worked together after that, Aftermath and I. She could see the future, sometimes. Usually it was bad news. She was desperate most of the time, and so I was too. There was always something to fight, and I wasn't ever strong enough, even when I was holding my own arm-wrestling Dad and tossing asteroids bigger than the city. There was always another prop, another way to get stronger, and they never lasted. I loved her, but we were awful together. But it's not like we were any good apart, either. We'd save the world, then start feeling the withdrawal when the strength spell wore off. Sometimes it was literal withdrawal, strength drugs that made us rage-crazed berserkers, then made us shake like a cast-iron radiator at the end of its life. Sometimes we'd become a threat, super-strong and rage-blind. Trip came out the first time that happened. Told him next time I wouldn't hold back, wouldn't let him subdue me. He pretended it was a joke, but the times after that it was Fafnir who got the call. He knows berserkergang, knew how to break it. We'd break up, I'd try to get away from the business, hide in a monastery or the Orange Deeps of the Pacific, and a few months later she'd show up and tell me the sun was going to explode if we didn't get back together right then. And she didn't lie, not about her visions, so what was I going to do? I've been my normal weak self for a year. Better than anyone outside the business, but still weak. Not fit to fight in that league, for sure. Been sort of proud of it. But when the phone rang, when I saw it was her, I felt it. Excitement. Relief. "Thank God this nonsense is over, time to get back to my real life." Only it wasn't her. It was her sister. I didn't know she had a sister. I didn't know a lot of things. Her sister called because she left a note, sealed and addressed to me. I came. She told me when the funeral would be. I mumbled something and shuffled away, staring at the paper in my hand, wondering what she might have seen that she couldn't face. Some dire tomorrow that I would have to steal the strength of the Olympians to stop? I waited until I got home to open it. It was just one word, shaky and streaked. "Sorry." It feels good, as good as it can, given, to punch a wall. It would feel better to punch through it, to feel the concrete crumble at my blows. And maybe I will, sooner or later. I've always been weak. There's a merchant selling charms in Little Seoul. I know his price. Maybe, maybe soon. But not today.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:29
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