Recent Online Reading: Short Notes about Short Stories

Was fiddling this for a writing retreat I’m doing in September. This is from the beginning.

June, 1976, Indiana

On Indiana summer evenings, the fireflies begin their dance as dusk creeps over the landscape, reducing green to gray and black and brown. Their lights are yellow as sunlight or neon; they blink among the hedges and maneuver a few inches above the tall grass. There are five varieties of fireflies native to the Northern Indiana region. Each signals prospective mates with specific timing, and no four second interval firefly would approach a six second interval one.

On the same summer evenings, the mosquitoes whine, though only the female ones, hovering before landing on unsuspecting arms and ankles, draining as much as they can before either taking off, heavy and bloated with their sanguine plunder, or else are splattered and exploded by their victim when he or she notices not the sting of the needlelike proboscis being inserted, but the tickle of their feet among the fine, downy hair arms.

Other creatures come out later: soft-nosed rabbits and the tiny bats that flitter around lampposts, devouring the night insects swarming there. Possums drag their heavy bodies along, investigating garbage cans and quarreling with the raccoons come to plunder. There are even rats, in some places along the St. Joseph River, water rats that move through the green-brown water, searching among the slimy weeds that coat the bottom. But the fireflies are already there: they have marked the coming of the night, lighting as though protesting the approaching darkness.

Michigan Street crosses down from the state of Michigan, comes through Northern Indiana and splits one of its larger cities, South Bend, like a splayed bird. Corn fields and alfalfa lie further out but here the street slashes the city’s belly, unfolds layers like the dark verge of Notre Dame University, the struggling downtown, the unsavory brew further south of town as you headed down to the smaller towns: Lakeville, Lapaz, Plymouth. Far to the south it reaches Kokomo, later Indianapolis, then the nether region of the state, which hosted the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties.

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This is from the BFFT (Big Fat Fantasy Trilogy) that is my current work-in-progress. I have the first book completely blocked out now, so I’m going to fill in all the blank spots, then block the next and do it and so forth. Anyway, this is from early in the book and is the first appearance of Teo, who is a major character. I’m actually switching my Clarion West writeathon goals over to novel chunks to make them a bit more in alignment with my highest priority, which is finishing this trilogy.

He’d been born with a Shadow Twin. Teo was the only person in the whole village who could say that, and he was the only person who’d had a Twin that almost all of them (except Teracit, who claimed to be old enough to have once shook hands with the original Duke) had ever encountered.

He was sitting in the cliff face that overlooked the river, in an icicle-choked crevice. The sun was rising. He’d crept out early, saying he was going to check snares, but truth was, he liked sitting and watching the world go pale grey, then violet, then gold and lavender, sumptuous as silk embroidery.

Often he wondered what his life would have been like if his Twin had drawn breath after the womb. History said that men and women with living Shadow Twins to assist there went on to do marvelous things. Verranzo and his Shadow Twin had each done a marvelous thing: Verranzo had founded Verranzo’s New City, far to the east on the coast, and his Shadow Twin (female, as Teo’s had been, for a Shadow Twin always took the opposite gender of its sibling) had gone south, with the Duke of Tabat, and founded a city in his name.

Teo’s would not found cities, would not draw on any of a Twin’s reputed powers: toe extend life or augment magical abilities. Verranzo’s Twin had been able to tame creatures with her voice alone.

Snow swans flew across the river far below in a glitter and beating of wings. He’d snared one of them last year and his father had beaten him, because you never knew when a creature like that, a swan or eagle or wolf, might be a fellow Shifter or Beast, and exempt from being hunted or trapped accordingly.

His swan had not been intelligent, but it had been lively when he’d freed it as Da had ordered. It beat at him with clublike wings as strong as Da’s fist, and its head darted at his face and hands like a snake, hissing and clacking its bill. He cut it loose and it waddled away, then leap up against the moons, its wings driving it upward, frosted with starlight. It honked derisively at Teo, poor bruised Teo who couldn’t shift, and therefore couldn’t tell what was or wasn’t a fellow Beast.

If he’d been Human, he would have been famous, might have been taken to Tabat to serve the latest generation of Dukes. But he was a Shifter, even if a failed one, and Humans hated Shifters, even more than the Beasts they habitually enslaved. So he and the other villagers must keep quiet, passing themselves off as unremarkable in the eyes of explorers and priests, here in the frontier territory that belonged to neither city.

Sunlight glinted on the river’s frozen mirrors, far below, dazzling him. Despite the worry that rode his shoulders “” why, just today, were others avoiding his eyes? And what had happened in the night to his youngest sister, little Bea, who’d been struck with fever the last four days. Fever didn’t come often to the villagers, but when it did, it could kill.

Teo and his sister were all the children his parents had. No wonder they had haunted Bea’s bedside day and night.

Someone was crossing the river; his uncle Pioyrt, in Beast form, an immense, slope-shouldered cougar, with two grouse gripped tight in his jaws, his whiskers drawn back to avoid their feathers. This time of tear hunting was bad and they’d eaten porridge and baked roots too often lately. At least one bird would be reserved for broth for Bea, but the rest might be fried with roots for something more appetizing than usual, crisp bits of meat and perhaps even a trip into the spice sack for a couple of peppercorns to grind or a pinch of dried orange peel. His mouth watered.

He raised his knees, wedging them against the rock’s cold, slick bite, to lift himself upwards, grainy snow crunching under his gloves and boots as he scrambled onto the top of the cliff. He paused to look once more out over the world. The clouds shawled the mountain that rose of the valley’s opposite side, its flanks white with snow, slicks of purple and cobalt streaking their sides. The river was a gray and blue snakeskin, laced over with the black skeletons of trees.

He sighed and turned his face homewards.