Tabita interrupted. She was a classic old crone of Tabat, her skin darkened from exposure to the salt wind, her hair cut short in the manner of sailors, which older women affected due to its easiness, if they had retained enough hair to make the style dignified.
Tabita had. She was a severe but elegant woman of perhaps sixty, with turquoise eyes and a string of amber around her neck. “They say ghosts linger because of unfinished business,” she said to the Doctor. “Is that true?”
He stroked his whiskers, eying the squid pudding that trembled like a fever patient in the center of the table. “On occasion, ma’am, aye.”
“Is that why our twins linger then? Some unfinished business?”
“It is more likely that one or the other of them does not realize she is dead,” he said, parceling out a fragment of the pudding, which smelled better than it looked. An oily sheen rainbowed its surface.
“How could they not know that?” a waitress squeaked, he wasn’t sure which one.
Doctor Fantastik fixed her with a portentous eye. No particular amount of ghost energy clung to her, other than the growth that covered them all, the ectoplasmic snail ooze that ghosts could not help but exude and which grew throughout this building, shaggy and slimy as rotting moss.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Teaser: A Seed on the Wind
The Jelly Bean Tanker Explosion, drawn using Sketchpad Pro on the iPad, included here because a blog entry is so much more interesting looking when there's a visual element. Plus, I like this picture.Should it be “on” or “upon” the wind? I’m torn. Either way, here’s a scrap to tantalize you a little.
He tried the drugs of Waterdeep.
He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.
He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.
He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.
He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.
He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.
He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.
He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.
He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.
He drifted from high to high, abandoning himself and becoming a new thing.
This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.
Talking in the Night
It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.
After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.
“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”
“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”
He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.
Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.
One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.
He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.
It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.
But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.
She answered.
She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.
And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.
In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
