Thief

Clouds drift over the moon.

Ellen feels the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed to the back of her head.

Her heart stops and the chill spreads. Ice runs through her veins.

Her eyes widen, moisten. Fear climbs from her tight chest to her throat; it forces a choked sob from her dry mouth.

A breath like silk on her neck elicits tiny tremors. She can smell vodka and sour sweat.

“You are nothing, to the universe.” Male, low, soft.

The trigger clicks.

The moon re-emerges.

And she is alone, her heart beating wildly, warm piss soaking her jeans.





(Originally written for Lily Child's Friday Prediction)

Tower

I am here, against intergalactic law, because important, anonymous people grew tired of waiting. So the galaxies turn.

The Darkling’s tower is impenetrable to our technology, and thus, invaluable. Scientists observing the structure from the legal sanctity of space have learnt nothing. And so impatience has brought me to this planet, to my death.

It has been called their Tower of Babel, though nobody knows if they even have a God. They have a devil. I have seen it. I have seen the pit beneath the tower, and the indescribable thing within.

Are they imprisoning it? Or setting it free?






(Originally written for Lily Child's Friday Prediction)

Extinction

He admired his engineered body. He was success, perfection; he was to be the template for the new breed.

Humanity had lost its way, stepped outside of evolution. The weak were allowed to thrive; the meek had already inherited the Earth. That would no longer be tolerated.

He flexed his weaponry, watching sharpness shift beneath his inky, black skin. Spikes of bone clawed at him from the inside, thirsty for freedom, for the fight, for a bite of human flesh.

He was just the first.

War was coming. To the victor go the spoils.

To the victor go the planet.






(Originally written for Lily Child's Friday Prediction)

Cattle

“Ah ha! Found it!”

Doc Carmine brandished the template with blue-stained fingers.

He returned to his workbench and pressed his head to the girl’s bare chest, listening. Lingering a little too long.

Still alive, good. They always overdid the spike... it just wasn’t good business to spoil the merchandise.

He hauled her onto her front and held the template against the pale skin of her hip, spreading his fingers to keep it in place, grabbing more flesh than was perhaps necessary.

The spray paint would only stain for a week or two. By then she’d be someone else’s property anyway.




(Originally written for Lily Child's Friday Prediction)

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)

Cacophony

Jeremy leaned against the rough brick wall of the clothes shop at the corner of Davey Place and Castle Street. He couldn’t remember if the shop was still a Monsoon and he didn’t check; another unresolved thought in his head was all the better.

He nodded to the big issue seller, closed his eyes and listened.

He could hear two off-key flautists busking down the street; the shuffling conversations of passersby; the thump of bass from the Panasonic shop; the Royal Arcade’s Christmas music; some Asian singer warbling from the Thai takeaway.

He couldn’t hear the voices.

What blissful cacophony.

Acolyte

I denounce my body.

Is the first commandment. You are but fertile ground for the red plague: let it inside you, let it become you.

I denounce my bonds.

Is the second. Forget your past, forget your family and friends. Those things have no meaning.

I embrace my thirst.

Is the third. It will be all you know.


She licks the warm, sticky gore from her hands, trembling as it slides down her throat.

She looks at the flesh that lies around her, broken, torn and hollow. It had names yesterday. She had family yesterday.

Today she has the plague.



(originally written for Lily Childs' Friday Prediction)

Fever

Tied down with burning sheets.

Her cool hands are excruciating relief; soft flutters of calm; gentle bulwarks against the storm I can feel swelling once more, drenching the linen and washing me away. My wife shush-shushes me as I am tossed between lucidity and patterned blindness. In the distance I hear someone crying for their wife, my wife. My wife is long dead. I am seeing everything and too much and none of it makes sense. My limbs writhe of their own accord, seeking some form, some sigil that is free from these panic-laden eddies.

Drowning in my own mind.

Glory

Leaves swirl around her. She becomes the centre of the eddying wind, the sudden focus of the world.

No longer just a passing stranger, she is transformed:

A hidden princess – no, too old, too lined: a queen – discovering the truth and power of her ancient, Elven lineage. A web of invisible arcana reaches out from her, pushing at reality.

She is transformed:

Her dabblings in arch-diablerie catch up with her and the demons she thought contained dance about her, stirring up the leaves, cackling, unseen by everyone else.

The wind shifts again, she walks on, once more just another passerby.

Big

Ansel took a bite of lamb. He savoured the salty burst of juices and smiled at the crackle of delicate bones between his teeth – the sound reminded him of happy days playing in human camps, amongst wooden huts.

He took another bite. It was these simple moments he enjoyed the most.

The third, final, bite. Some of his brothers would be done in two, but Ansel always saved the best for last. He popped the lamb’s head into his mouth. Mmm, the crack of the skull; the delicious, spongy brain meat.

He let out a contented belch. The ground shook.

Puppet

Wired. Silken strings throb beneath his skin, uplifting.

He takes his first steps, tentative, a newborn foal.

Step, step. Steady, step, step.

He dances for them, for all of them. And they all want him, want control.

And none of them want to share.

Pushed, pulled, thrust, thrown. Too many hands on him, too many puppeteers.

He screams, screams and they panic.

They let go and he crumples, a deflated dream. They stare at him. They accuse him with their shock and their silence.

He would walk away, should walk away, but he hasn’t the strength to rise by himself.

Roulette

MyLifeYourLifeMyLifeYourLifeMyLifeYourLife

MyLife YourLife MyLife YourLife MyLife

Your Life My Life. Your Life My Life. Your Life

My Life. Your Life. My Life.

Your Life.

My Life.

Your Life.

...

Ah. Oh dear.

You lose.

Rigged? No. Quite impossible.

I did suggest chess, remember? You can’t blame me for a game of chance.

Can’t blame yourself either, though I suppose that’s no comfort.

I’ll give you a minute.

Just remind me, what was your wife’s name? I’d hate to slip up on something so basic.

Doors

He dreams a vast emptiness.

Sometimes it is a desert, lifeless sand for miles, other times it is bare stone or warm, soft dust. Once it was gently swaying grass as far as the eye could see; just the once.

He crosses on foot, for hours, until he reaches the doors.

Hundreds of doors.

Behind them, he is sure, so sure, are wonderful places where his family and friends wait for him. But whichever door he picks, as it opens he knows he has chosen the same door, again. And it is too late.

He steps through, he wakes, alone.

Pixies

This little pixie went to market,
This little pixie stayed at home,
This little pixie had roast meat,
And this little pixie had none.

And this twisted little pixie, sat alone in his police cell, couldn’t stop giggling hysterically.

Wee, wee, wee, wee, wee!

All his older brothers were dead. The eldest was in pies; the next in the cold, damp soil beneath the floorboards. He had tied the twins up... cut parts off one, seasoned the meat with salt and a slow poison, then cooked it and fed it to the other.

Never would he be ‘little piggy’ again.