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in, flash,  also, hi thunderdome
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Mar 13, 2019 01:05
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| # ¿ Feb 11, 2025 02:36 |
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dumbass little pictures 1495 words You thrive in the first moments of dawn, while others still sleep. The jalopy's flickering headlights squint into the predawn dark. The sideroad twists and turns before you. lovely country plays on the radio. There's enough light and haze in the air to keep the stars from being really visible. No fireflies anymore, either. Just the gray forest looming around the cracked asphalt. You drive around the wide, bare hump of an old landfill and pull into a dirt lot barely wide enough for two cars. The truck's engine whines a juddering wheeze as you turn it off. Prolly should get that looked at. You step down from the truck and stretch, wincing as something in your back pops. Your breath fogs the air. Chilly, not quite freezing. You hear the chirps of crickets and frogs, distant cars; there's a highway a ways to the south of here, busy even this time of morning. You grab your hiking pack from the foot of the driver's seat and pull out the can of scentless deodorant, give yourself a liberal spray. Gotta get the smell of dying truck off of you, best you can. You snap on your old flashlight and set off to begin your morning hunt. The trailhead's just a break in the guardrail next to the road, a thin footpath stretching off into the woods. There's a piece of plywood stuck into the ground with a laminated map stapled to it, unreadable in the gray light. Unreadable in the yellow circle of your flashlight, too. drat thing's faded to parchment. Leaves crunch under your feet as you walk. The air tastes of loam and oak, new leaves poking out of their buds. It's a tentative sort of spring this year. You think the woods aren't sure if winter's over yet. The trail winds up and around the hump of the landfill. It's a strange thing to look at, a big lump covered in dead and sickly grass. You gratefully leave it behind as you follow the trail back into the forest proper. You draw a stiff little bag out of your pack as you walk, unzip it, draw your hunting weapon: an old canon, cheap telefoto lens sticking out the front. A relic of the early 2000s like your truck, all rounded bezels and chunky logos. It's funny, logos. You started noticing them a few months ago. Walked past a fence with a logo on it, and wondered why anybody felt the need to put a logo on a fence. Then you saw them everywhere. Toilets with logos, shirts with logos, cars with logos; bananas with logos, lightbulbs with logos, shoes with logos. Hell, people with logos -- you've got a lovely skull-and-crossbones tattoo on your right shoulder. Humanity's quest: put dumbass little pictures on everything. The oaks around you loom mute in the darkness. The trail meets up with a thin brook and turns to follow it to its source, up along a small dell. The water burbles quietly as you walk beside it. Used to be the brooks around here ran rust-red, contaminants from the landfill. They put in filters after the country club down the way complained about the fish dying. At the top of the valley there's a 20-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall wall of tangled branches. Beaver dam. Weathered the winter well enough, looks like. It's anchored to a big boulder on one side. You clamber up the rock with your flashlight in your teeth, savoring the rasp of the cool granite against your hands. You reach the top and stand for a moment. The dam holds back a wide lake, mirror-smooth, reflecting the blue light of the warming sky. The lake's hugged on either side by steep hills, one bare and stony, the other carpeted in pines. A single dead tree juts into the sky from the center of the water. You hear tiny ripples lapping at the shore, a symphony of insects, the beeping of frogs, a few of the ratchety-click calls of bats. A grin finds its way across your face. You hop down from the boulder. The footpath meanders along the edge of the lake, through a stand of tall grass. It rustles against your legs as you walk. (Gotta check for ticks when you get home.) Eventually, the path makes a sharp left, up into the hills. You leave it, and walk into the woods at the edge of the grass. There's a spit of land here that juts out into the lake. Good vantage point. The underbrush scratches at your legs as you shine your light around, questing for a good spot to lie in wait. You choose a wide slab of rock a foot from the shore, ringed by reeds. As you approach the shore, you hear several alarmed ribbits, and see splashes as frogs squirt away deeper into the lake. You hop onto the rock. There's an excellent view of a stretch of shore here. You've got good shots across the lake as well, and the rock is dry. Carefully, you lower yourself lie flat on your belly, and settle in to wait, camera poised. The sky is lightening. Still not bright enough to shoot, but you see whites and ambers in the sky between the hills in the east. Dawn soon. A mourning dove croons somewhere in the forest, a nostalgic sound. Here and there in the water around you, small lumps emerge, little pairs of them. The eyes of frogs, peeking out of the lake, scowling at the world in general. You feel the prickle of tiny feet across your hand, a meandering harvestman. You blow gently on it and it skitters away. You scan the lake for any piles of logs, searching for the beaver lodge, but can't find it. Must be further upstream. The only thing in the lake is the dead tree, a proud old pine stripped bare and listing like a drunk. It used to have companions. This was more of a swamp, once, a whole stand of skeletal trees jutting proudly into the sky. Herons nested in them, great blues. They made nests adorning the tops of the snags, big messy blobs like fat afros. You could watch them feed their young through binoculars. Not anymore, though. Couple of years ago, some dumbass dynamited a beaver dam upstream. A wave of water came through, a small tsunami that smashed everything in its way. Two more layers of beaver dams got knocked out, the bridge on Chestnut Drive got taken down, couple of houses got water damage. And of course most of the trees in the swamp were knocked over. The beaver came back, rebuilt; the pond's filled back in nicely. But the herons stayed away. Light's a lot brighter; the birds are singing in earnest now. You line up the camera, snap a few test pics of rocks and frog eyes. They come out decent. (No shutter sound. You shut that off after it ruined a shot of a deer a while ago.) You adjust the exposure a bit and take a few more. As the sun is just cresting the horizon in the east, you spot a ripple of movement in the water. It's moving towards you. Cautiously, you line up the camera and start taking shots, finger clicking steady, once a second. The ripple crests; the top of a small head emerges. Beaver! Mid-size, swimming without a care in the world, fur looking black and golden in the amber light. Eventually it hits the bank and ambles out of the water -- not 15 feet away.. With bated breath, you keep shooting, unable to believe your luck. The beaver scurries up to a sapling, turns its head, and quietly starts gnawing around the base, giving you a set of nice angles as it goes. You can hear the crunch of its teeth biting into the wet wood. After a strip of bark has been peeled off, beaver stops its chewing and sits back on its haunches, surveying the landscape around it, then goes still. There's something ancient in its gaze, looking over the lake. You take another picture, not breathing. The beaver bolts for the bank. It hits the water with a sound like a gunshot and a massive splash. You jump involuntarily. Once you recover, the beaver's gone, only a widening circle of ripples showing it was there at all. Blinking, you steady yourself. Tail-slapping; beaver warning signal. Belatedly, you turn to look where the beaver was looking, squinting into the bright light of the rising sun. Far in the distance, you see the thin line of a hawk. You twist onto your back to grab a shot, but it dips behind a hill before you can line the camera up. For a moment, you just lay there. After a second, you remember to breathe, and take a deep, shuddery breath. You make a quiet, very sincere fist-pump; then you flip over onto your belly, ready to catch whatever else you can while the light lasts.
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Mar 18, 2019 03:57
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ok question: what's the etiquette for crits? like are you allowed to just throw a couple out or do you need to do the whole batch of stories for the week?
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Mar 18, 2019 22:44
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in! https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/australian-kelpie/ but just to keep on task, i'm definitely gonna have a dog in the story
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Apr 3, 2019 05:39
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oh god oh gently caress I completely forgot about my toxx this week uhhh, the story of Max the Australian Kelpie dog 995 words Once there was an Australian Kelpie dog named Max. Max lived a life as a housepet in a gray cul-de-sac somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. Max was constantly haunted by mysterious urges he couldn't understand; urges to run, to chase, to lead, to herd; but herd what he could never quite figure out. The squirrels in the yard rejected his advances, and whenever he stayed inside and practiced herding the couch cushions the people who lived in the house would get mad. He loved them anyway. The people spent most of their time hunting. They caught all manner of strange and delicious beasts and stashed the corpses in their strange bright burrow. Sometimes they'd share choice cuts of meat with Max; other times they only gave him scraps, or dusty brown pellets in a little bowl by the door. He ate the pellets dutifully, knowing he should keep up his strength for herding. One day one of the people in the house -- a woman-person who smelled like plastic and dandelions -- stopped coming back from her daily hunts. Max missed her. The other woman-person, who always smelled of incense, seemed to miss her too, flopping down on the couch each day, lazing and grunting instead of playing with Max. (She did spend a lot of time hugging and grooming him, which he didn't mind. It annoyed him sometimes, especially when he was antsy and wanted to play, but he tolerated it to comfort her. She didn't like being groomed, anyway, always swatting away his tongue. So if scratching him calmed her, he'd try to relax and enjoy it.) One day incense-smell didn't go out to hunt, and stayed in her room the whole day. Max could smell her inside. He sat outside the door, waiting for her to come out all morning. Around noon he started pacing and whining, worried, but she ignored him. When the sun was halfway to setting she came out, smelling like musk and sleep. He pushed his head at her leg to get her attention; she absentmindedly scratched him and poured some dusty pellets and water into his bowls, then went back into her room and closed the door. It started to happen more often. The incense-scented woman went out less and less, staying at home or in her room more and more, never walking Max, just letting him outside. Eventually there came a stretch of two days where she forgot to give Max any meat or pellets, and his bowl ran out. He sat curled outside her door as the sun set, nibbling thoughtfully at tangles in his fur. Eventually he came to a decision, and settled down to rest. When the sun woke him, he yawned and stretched, preparing himself. He turned to the door, shook out his fur, and in his best and sternest voice, shouted an alert. He heard the incense-woman shifting and grumbling in her nest, so he shouted the alert again, and again. Eventually she opened the door, making displeased songs with a scratchy voice. Smells poured heavy from the room behind her; stale food, the sickly smell of the long-rotted water that she drank sometimes, her natural scent unscoured by washing. She looked tense, frustrated; but before she could lash out, Max kicked into gear. He darted behind her and set to rumbling a friendly growl. She made some noises but eventually gave up, and went back to lie down in her nest. Max didn't let her. He jumped up onto the nest and upped his growl a little, adding a note of warning to it. She backed off a bit, wary, front legs raised a little to defend herself. He hopped down from the bed and walked towards her, growling more. Eventually she got the hint and backed out of the room. He followed her as she walked through the house. When she tried to go into the room where the plastic-and-dandelions woman used to nest, he ratcheted up the growl again, until she backed off and walked towards the kitchen. Once they came to the kitchen, he led her to the back door, bumping his head into her heels to keep her moving. Once they were there, he walked pointedly over to his food bowl. She got the hint, and poured him some water and gray pellets. He ate quickly, keeping an eye on her, and then left his bowl and steered her to the back door. She looked at him, exasperated, but he'd gotten this far, and wasn't going to give up now. Eventually she made a placating sound and started putting on her shoes; he leapt and bounded around her with joy. They left the house and started down their usual path through the woods. The woman walked slowly at first, distastefully, like she wasn't used to it. Max nipped gently at her heels to encourage her to speed up. Sometimes he would bound ahead of her, looking out for danger; then he would return to her heels, keeping her on task. As they walked down the trail, the woman picked up her pace, getting used to her legs again. She started to sing more songs to max, in a friendlier voice than before. She started to strut, and to jog. Eventually they came to a clearing, a wide expanse of tall grass. Max looked at her expectantly; she smiled, and then tensed playfully, like she was going to pounce. Max tensed too, waiting for her to move. They stared each other down for a long, frozen moment. Then she moved, and Max bolted, sprinting across the field. She took off after him, following slowly on her strange ungainly legs. She sang a happy song. Max turned and ran circles around her, shouting with joy, staying just out of her reach. Eventually she fell down in the tall grass, giggling; max flopped down next to her and rolled around on his back, panting, happy. He'd found somebody to herd. animist fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Apr 8, 2019 |
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Apr 8, 2019 07:58
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