Shatter

My mind is in pieces.

They tell me that with every jump I left a part of myself behind.

They tell me it’s gone forever, but I’ve had time to think, in this padded room. If I concentrate, I can feel the different pieces, in all the different worlds.

There are threads stretching out from me to them; from me to me.

I’ve been pulling at the threads. I feel the walls between worlds resisting; they are not easy to breach, but I feel them cracking, I feel reality ready to splinter.

It’s my mind, and I want it back.

Inheritance

Rose remembered how grandmother’s magic shimmered and shivered around them. It smelt acrid and sweet, like burning cupcakes; felt like hot soap bubbles bursting on their skin. Grandmother’s fragile voice would rise and fall deliriously, from crow’s shriek to baby’s burbling chortle. Round again, and again.

So many years ago, lives ago.

Now Rose is grandmother.

The magic swells inside her, wailing and whispering its way from her startled mouth. It pulls at her, wild and strong... and she’s sitting with her mother and her grandmother, and other women, older and deeper... everything echoed in time. Round again, and again.

Entombed

He turns the death garland over in gnarled hands.

A wreath of bones, and things resembling bones; fragments of animal, man and machine. Lives, deconstructed.

Death, reconstructed.

Debris, become the key to beyond.

He had been bound for millennia; buried with penumbral beasts from the flickering, cave-fire dawn of fear, with the scritching, scratching of fraying claws and too-big teeth in snapping jaws. Then the Earth split and scraps of modern man fell in.

Now he yearns, a yawning ache, for the world without.

He turns his key. The lock cracks.

He walks free... and dark things ride his shadow.





(originally written for Lily Child's Friday Prediction)

Torn

Madame Fox cries tears of black tar.

She is the heartbreak that is the last thing ex-lovers share. She is the dead rose, caught in the middle.

She could surrender to this and be torn apart – a conjoined heart still beating as it is ripped asunder, geysering lifeblood in faltering plumes – or she can change, shift and escape: grow fleet, grow feral.

They call her name, make bets on who she will come to, but she is wild now, and besides, they are calling her old name, her human name.

Her tears turn to white whispers. Petals in a snowstorm.




(Originally written for Lily Childs' Friday Prediction)