teasers

I’d been feeling queazy for miles “” too much fresh fruit last town, trying to pack in as much as I could “” so finally I tapped Roto on the shoulder and we left the bus during a stretch and pee break. Big Fredo was driving the tents truck and he had a sweet spot for Roto, so he let us climb up into the sheltered spot just behind the cab, where we were sheltered from the wind but still could feel the bite of the air and where, if I needed to, I could lean out and vomit into the sandy gravel of the road.

It made me feel better almost immediately and my mood, which had been gloomy and self pitying (or so Roto kept informing me), lifted, as though the high blue sky overhead were pulling it upwards.

Okay, maybe I had been being kind of a bitch. I shrugged at Roto in apology and he shrugged back. That was one of the nice things about Roto. Once a fight was over, it was done with. It was a quality I envied, and couldn’t begin to claim. I was capable of holding a grudge for years, and had all my life, even though that was only fifteen years so far.

He grinned sideways at me, whiskers twitching, and leaned back to let his upper torso, bare except for the stripes of dun for, smolder golden in the sun. I settled back myself, though I stayed in the shade.

On my right, past Roto, was the steep downward slope of the cliff, covered with slides of shale and wiry brown bushes and past that, a blaze of sunlight on the ocean, dazzling and headache inducing. I looked away and up the mountainside. We were swinging out and around a curve before going inward and Sieg, who was the pace setter up front in his jeep, was, in my opinion, taking it a little fast.

That’s how I saw it. Flash flash. Two blinks of light from far up the mountain ahead of us. Then again. Flash flash.

I squinted up the mountain but didn’t see it again. But I crawled forward, clinging to the netting that held the ranks of tents in place, and tapped my knuckles hard on the cab’s back window. Kali was riding shotgun, her own window open and dreads flying back in the wind. She twisted around to slide the window open.

“I saw someone signaling up ahead,” I shouted.

“We’re on it,” she shouted back. Big Fredo tapped the bead in his ear. Someone else must’ve seen it as well, and gotten to our radio network faster than I had. That was always the story. I was never the hero. My spirits sagged again.

Kali slammed the window shut and turned back to watching the road ahead. I made my slow return to Roto. It seemed to me we had sped up a little but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was just my own anxiety.

Roto gave me a questioning look.

“They’re on it, she said.” I shrugged. Not like we could do much about anything. Better to move forward with our eyes open than let them know we had spotted them and they should open fire.

A faded blue sign flickered past. “Rest stop 1 mile Gas Services”

“You know that’s where they’re going to try to hit us,” Roto said. He stopped lounging and leaned forward.

“Yeah, but what else can they do? There’s no other place to turn around.”

We both wriggled back as far as we could, putting furled canvas between ourselves and possible missiles. The smart-canvas of the main tent might stop a bullet but the thick rolls of more ordinary heavy fabric would still foil arrows or darts.

My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore at all. Instead, hot bile chewed at the back of my throat and worry threaded all my bones. We hadn’t brought weapons with us from the bus; June doesn’t like us carrying them around, but when we’re traveling, we’re supposed to have something with us.

Roto had claws and teeth. I had nothing but my own blunt fists and wits.

Gravel hissed under the wheels as we swung left and slowed. I tried to peer out.

Roto put his palm on the top of my head and shoved downward. “Don’t be an asshole, Meg.”

We held still. I could hear the other cars and trucks pulling in, slowing. The turnaround must have been blocked, otherwise Sieg would have used it to lead the whole convoy to circle back as quickly as he could while Vera had our backs. But stopping there meant there was some sort of blockade.

A voice from up ahead. A man’s voice, and one that had meanness in it despite the pleasantness of the words. “And a good afternoon to you folks!”

Car door slamming and then the crunch crunch of footsteps, barely audible over the sound of the last few stragglers pulling in. I knew that if I looked back people would be fanning out as best they could. We all drilled aon what to do on occasions like this, but I’d only been in a few fights. And not since I had become, technically, an adult.

But surely an adult would have known enough to carry at least a knife with them. I glanced over at Roto and was relieved to see that he looked as anxious as I felt.

June’s deep voice, carefully modulated and empty of emotion. “Afternoon, gentlemen.”

I angled my line of sight upward, hoping to catch a glance of Vera. So much depended on what these bandits were carrying. Hopefully, just a few guns, but probably a bit more than that.

“We were just discussing how it looked as though your trucks were too heavily loaded,” the voice said. “We thought maybe we could help you out, maybe take some of the livestock. That way you’ve got less to feed, we’ve got more to feed ourselves with.” He laughed, the sort of laugh where you could easily imagine the sneer that came with it.

June’ voice, so polite. “I’m afraid that the livestock are members of the troupe as well.”

The man mimicked her. “I’m afraid that you don’t have a choice.”

“That’s a point of debate,” June said. “Vera, now.”

Not many people have seen any of the old war machines. Some were disabled, others disabled themselves. We don’t know what side Vera was on back then. Just that she was on ours now.

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This is the YA SF novella (?) I’m working on.

Synopsis: Stella’s life is on the unusual side, but whose isn’t nowadays, half a century after the Fall that led to this ruined landscape with its mesh of mythology and machinery? Still, being brought up as part of a troupe of circus performers wandering along the coast of the Inner Sea, going from small village to small village, sets her apart from many.

Even more alienating is the fact that she doesn’t know who her parents were. The others in the troupe deny any knowledge of them, and so Stella feels herself a stranger among them, particularly as adulthood draws near and she must figure out what her role with the circus will be.

When one of the circus elders reveal that Stella’s mother was, in fact, a circus performer, Stella must navigate feelings of betrayal, new responsibilities, and her mother’s legacy of magic-enhancing technology. When she fails to control her temper and half the circus burns down as a result, she’s ejected from the only family she’s ever known.

Accompanied by a village girl named Abacus (Abbie), the two strike inland, hoping to find the city that Stella’s father was rumored to come from. Their ingenuity and bravery are put to the test as they battle minotaurs, mutants, and other perils created by the crumbling technology of a long-gone scientific age.

When they finally come to the city, they find it deserted, much to their despair. But that night they are seized and taken to find Stella’s father, who lives far above on the space station. Abbie is slated to be the human sacrifice who will “pay” for Stella’s admission to the station, but when they find out they manage to (with great peril and suspense) flee to an abandoned lunar colony, where they come face to face with the greatest challenge of all: the aliens who created the Fall.

From the first chapter:

I’m practicing juggling again, because it’s raining outside, big fat bloodwarm drops drumming on the tent’s waxed canvas. In an hour, as the day’s light vanishes, the circus’s light will begin to flicker and shine, powered by the ancient turbine/treadmill pulled by three ponies and a servobot. Townsfolk will wander through the maze of entrance gates and aisles, hesitant and eager all at once, pockets full of silver slugs and other tradeable metal.

They’ll wander through the booths, looking at the freakshows and trying their luck at the games, winding their way towards the bigtop, ready to make their way up the creaking bleachers and sit to watch marvels unfold.

This time we’re within earshot of the ocean, a jungle-hugged glade near two different villages.

I drop a beanbag and curse. I’ve worked my way up to four at a time, but keeping five aloft continues to elude me.

Roto the Tiger Boy sticks his head in the flap in time to catch the last words. His whiskers twitch. He holds out a tin silently and I take it, gesture at him to sit on the floor. He does, closing his eyes as I start to apply the orange greasepaint that colors his dun fur, turning him from an ordinary cat-man to something more exotic.

What can I apply to myself, what will turn me into the exotic thing the circus just hasn’t realized it needs yet?

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#sfwapro

Another teaser from a steampunk short story I’ve been working. My codename for this world is Altered America, and this is the fifth short story I’ve placed in it.

Each time they stepped on the swaying platform between the cars, Laurel paused. Jemina couldn’t blame her. There was an exhilaration to the travel when you could feel the buffet of the passing air that was lacking when you were inside the actual cars.
They stopped outright on the last one. Laurel clenched the railing, shoulder-height for her, with both hands and looked out. Her hair lashed in the wind like an uncontrollable Medusa’s tangle.

“Will we see Indians?” she said.

“Quite probably,” Jemina said.

“And buffalo?”

“Undoubtedly.” Jemina had, as was her way, researched the trip well before embarking on it. She knew the distances between cities, and had the route plotted out on the map of the United States that hung in her head, colored with elementary school dyes, unfaded over the years.

Laurel took a deep breath of the wild air, sweet grass mingled with coal smoke, before reluctantly moving to the door.

Jemina stepped after her. They both nearly collided with the passenger coming out, who scowled at both of them, dividing the look between both and them and pronouncing them equally unsatisfactory. He was dressed in the Western style, with high-heeled boots, but with a tuft of lace at his untanned neck, a dandy’s puff that somehow set Jemina instantly against him.

Here’s a modern piece I’m working on right now, “Someday My Prince.” I believe it’s fantasy; I’m about 2000 words in so far, and really not sure whether it’ll stretch another 500 or 5000 words.

When Betty answered the apartment door, the man standing there was one of the most beautiful she’d ever seen. Tall, muscular, aquiline nose, dark hair”¦ he looked like he should be riding a white stallion on the beach in a cologne ad.

“Miss Vincent?” he said.

She faltered in the doorway, looking at him. You never know what to expect in New York, and surely this man wasn’t that out of the ordinary, except for the utterly expensive lines of his suit.

“Miss Vincent?” he repeated.

“I really need to get to work,” she said. “I don’t have time to buy anything.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m Aidan, your Prince.”

She didn’t understand.

He smiled at her. “I’m your Prince. I’ve come.”

She really did need to get to work.

***

Veronica said, “You say he’s a Prince?”

“I think that’s what he said. He wouldn’t go away until I promised to have dinner with him tonight.”

Veronica’s eyebrow lifted. “You could have called the police.”

“He was just so”¦nice,” Betty said.

Veronica’s other eyebrow lifted. “So are you going to tell him?”

“Of course,” Betty said. “Then he’ll know this is some kind of mix-up.”

***

On her daily phone call, her mother said, “You lucky, lucky girl!”

Betty tried to interject something but her mother went on. “I mean, we’re all promised that our prince will come some day, but most of them seem to get lost in transit. I don’t know anyone who’s actually gotten one.”

“Mom,” Betty said. “What do you mean, we’re all promised one? Who does the promising?”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. “Well,” her mother finally said, “I guess I don’t really know. The world? God? Yes, that’s probably it. God promises if we’re good, someday our prince will come.”

“I think you’re confusing God and fairy tales,” Betty told her.

This story’s still deciding whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. I suspect a little of both.

When he realized how upset his wife was, George wondered if he might have miscalculated. Normally a quiet and loving partner, she was unpacking the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and muttering.

“It’s not as though you even ever dated her!” she said, slamming a series of mugs into the cupboard.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” he replied, watching as she swept up the basket of cutlery and began throwing it into a drawer to jangle against his nerves. “I’ve left you everything. All I did was will her a copy!”

She turned, resting her hands on her hips. “You’re leaving her a copy of your personality. Essentially yourself.”

“No,” he said. “I’m leaving that to you. You’ll have me on tape, you’ll be able to transfer me into some mechanical form to keep you company. I just thought Janice might like one too.”

“Why?” Mary’s glare said she had her own suspicions.

George refused to dignify them with a reply. He’d been faithful to her all his life. A good husband. He could be allowed his own eccentricities, and If leaving a copy of himself, a digital copy created from a barrage of tests and brain scans and gathered data, to an old friend was one of those eccentricities, then he didn’t really see where Mary had the right to say much about it. She could leave her own copy or copies to her own friends.

I’m working on the sequel to recently-finished Beasts of Tabat, whose working title is Hearts of Tabat. Here’s a snippet I wrote this morning.

Adelina did something she’d mocked other people for doing. She consulted a Dream Reader.
Everyone sensible knew that Dream Readers were frauds, making up stories to suit the needs they could read in their clients. Everyone’s dreams were as individual as their minds, everyone had their own internal cartography leading to entirely different parts of their brains.

But the dream had come three mornings in a row. Three mornings when she woke up with a start, fear clamping its fingers, slender as reeds, strong as iron, around her throat, her hands clenched so hard that her nails bit into the heels of her hands.

She was walking along a bridge, which narrowed further and further, so much only a single person could walk across it, then crumbled away in the middle, leaving a two foot gap. She knew a wide enough step would take her across it, but when she looked down, she saw the water, seething with toothy eels, their lanterned eyes staring up at her, waiting for her to fall.

She saw Bella far, far away, down the long road on the other side, back turned as she walked away, too far to hear Adelina calling after her. Snowflakes were falling around her, as though a cloud echoed her progress overhead, and moonlight glinted on the snow, tinting it purple and red.

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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I’ve just started roughing out a new story, “A New Board is Elected at Villa Encantada”. I’ve written several Villa Encantada stories now, including “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammammish,” “Events at Villa Encantada,” and “The Threadbare Magician.” In this one I’m trying for dark and funny, and thinking it will end at 4-6k words.

A few weeks beforehand, the notices would begin to appear, first as shy and scarce as first daffodils, then later in desperate profusion, splashed among all the other flyers proclaiming one candidate or another. Then the secondary wave, responses to the veiled accusations or outright confrontations from those first campaign flyers.

They arrived in a variety of ways. At first in the mailboxes, in accordance with the bylaws.

Later more unorthodox means intended to grab attention for their words. Printed on invisible or octarine paper, scented with sulfur or jasmine, woven through with enchantments that produced moving, illustrative images of tiny workmen laboring on the parking lot or engaged in wrenching the building skirting awry with pirate-like gestures and red drunkard’s noses. A few unscrupulous tried bullying cantrips or mental snares, but those were quickly discovered and invoked a fresh crop of warnings, legal threats, and expansions of points previously made.

If you want to read the rest of the story, you can get it, along with at least six other stories, at the end of July by signing up to sponsor me in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Even a small donation entitles you to the stories, so please do sign up!

I finished a first draft of a new story, tentatively entitled The Crow’s Murder, today. It clocked in at 8300 words, which is technically a novelette, but I’ll probably trim enough to bring it down to official short story length, 7,500. I’m pleased with it, but there’s an angle that may let to WTFery on my writing group’s part when I run it past them. One thing I’ve done over the course of the past few days is track the progress of the story by taking pictures of early notes and saving snapshots of it from day to day. I’ll be using that in the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class and then looking at the story again when we get to the section on rewriting and revising.

So here it is. I hope it tantalizes you to read the rest!

I wheel the Colonel out into the day. He can walk, but prefers the dignity and slowness of the chair, in spite of its awkwardness, to having to struggle for every step. Dr. Larch will not let him have his artificial leg except when there are visitors. Otherwise it stays in the cabinet in the supplies room, along with all the rest, locked up so the patients can’t break or wear them down.

It’s just as well. Two days ago, when he surrendered it to me after a visit from his niece, the Col. said, “I knew every man of the three who owned this before me.” He slapped the brass surface. “And some fella will get it after me. Maybe someone I know, maybe someone I don’t. Do you think that ghosts linger around the objects they leave behind, the ones that accompanied them day by day? Because if so, I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t three ghosts riding this one.”

I didn’t answer and he didn’t expect me to. He knows my vocal cords were seared away in the same war that’s stole his leg, the same war that’s furnished most of the inhabitants of this asylum. Broken soldiers, minds and bodies ground-up by its terrible machines.

It used to be an injury was enough to get you out. Now if they can, they turn you into a clank, half human, half machine, and send you back to the lines. Nowadays we receive only the men who cannot be repaired, and here they sit or lie in their beds, waiting to die a slower death than the war would have given them, waited on by orderlies like me, other broken men who can function enough to pretend to work.

If you want to read the rest of the story, you can get it, along with at least six other stories, at the end of July by signing up to sponsor me in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Even a small donation entitles you to the stories, so please do sign up!

(This is from the yet untitled steampunk-new weird-horror piece which I’m thinking will be the first week’s Writeathon story and which I also think may end up at novelette length.)

Doctor Larch has a pet crow named Jonah. He says he raised it from a chick, but I have trouble imagining Doctor Larch patiently nursing anything, feeding it mealworms or bits of meat or making sure it was warm or sheltered. If he has such a faculty for tenderness, he doesn’t exhibit it towards any of the patients.

Today he made an appearance to supervise Mr. Abernathy’s removal from his chair.

They should have realized Abernathy was never moving from it, but the orderlies probably welcomed not having to lift him back and forth. They left him in there till his flesh grew into the wicker, and today he screamed while they cut it away and Doctor Larch watched. He wears a pad on his shoulder for the crow to shit on, but it misses a great deal of the time, and the Doctor’s black coat is clotted with gray and white on its backside.

It’s hit or miss whether or not Abernathy will survive. I don’t know that he cares, either way. Before this, all he did was stare out his window, day and night, looking eastward, towards the mountains the white men call the Cascades.

There was thunder last night. Not natural thunder, but echoes from the battle being waged far out to sea and among the San Juan Islands. We’re close enough to those battlelines that many people have fled Seattle. Others have stuck it out, saying that the lines will shift again, in a different direction.

I have stayed. But where else would I go?

Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon.