The Mimosa Effect 2

Since I haven’t written a piece for Saturday Scribes in a while, I thought I’d browse through the prompts from the last few months and see what tweaked my fancy. The result is a series of freefall flash-fiction pieces, that unite to make a five-part story arch. Covers most of the theme and word prompts from June 12 through Sept. 25 of this year.

“It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
- Nelson Mandela

I.
Trapped

Mistaken for dead, they carried him to a stone room, the room where his brother lay.  Seven years since the fall, when feathers had drifted like snow, and silver blood pooled like mercury on the frozen ground.  Measuring the hours by the frequency of the static on the radio, the day by the twining of the vines that grew from the bodies, how long it took for the red flowers to open.  When the pollen broke free and drifted up into the night sky, bright motes of dust turning to stars, he would know a year had passed.  And so it went.

II.
Adaptation

Winter came, a shock of snow on the trees, white against unseasonable green.  Darkness had become habitual, and so the light blinded him at first.  There was a hint of sweet decay in the air.  He thought of blankets of leaves settling after the rain.  There had been fingernail scratches in the stone, shining blue-white against the black.  He’d been given a watch as a child, its letters bright green in the unlit bedroom.  For a long time, he believed anything that glowed was radioactive, and had the potential to bestow superpowers.  He also knew these things could only happen by accident.  And so he willed himself to forget what he knew.  It was, he reflected, the only reason he was standing here now, blinking and shading his eyes against the glare.  To return to the living world, one need only forget that one is dead. 

III.
Rejection

Like most of her kind, she could not remember being born.  Her first memory was of floating, suspended on the wind, surrounded by winking sparks.  Their rising action guided, not by physics, but by something else – something that had dipped its fingers in the sunspots and swirled them as one might swirl milk in coffee, something that had watched molten magma cool and solidify, had seen the first rain fall on barren land, buffeted by waves tall as mountains.  Were she anyone else, they might have called it foolish bravado, this attempt to resist what they all assumed must be an irresistible force. But she was innocent, and so when she sang herself down again, they smiled and shook their heads and said, young people these days.  She won’t last long down there, they said, all alone in an unforgiving world.  She’ll come back eventually, they said, it’s only a phase.  She could not mark the precise moment when they forgot about her, but she felt it happen.  It was some time after the first moment she set bare feet on stone.

IV.
Precarious

The watch lay where he had left it, next to the bootleg Pogues album.  Some live concert in Bristol, before it had all come apart.  The face was dark, lifeless, until he ran a sentimental finger across the scuffed glass, leaving a smear of brightness that faded like fogged breath on a window.  Before the fall, the sight of a naked woman strolling through the wreckage as if on a summer beach might have startled him.  He had seen many such sights since, although the shapes had often staggered and stumbled, as if half-blind.  He had thought, the first time, that the fire might have returned, that the moon might once again be reflecting the sun.  They had all left, in the end.  His brother had died, trying to follow them.  Now here she was, marching through the steel graveyard towards him, as if she knew him. She must have gotten lost, he thought, all those years ago.  Only she did not walk like someone lost.  When they finally stood face to face, he realized that he knew her after all.  Sorry I’m late, she said.  He held up the broken watch.  The way his cheeks felt, oddly stretched, he must have been smiling.  I remember now, she said, how to bring it all back.

V.

It is Saturday, and they are leaning over the wooden railing, watching children play, boats made of sticks and paper bobbing in the green water.  At the end of the boardwalk, a woman in face paint is giving out free balloons.  Is this real? he asks.  She shrugs, says, that’s up to you.  Her hand on his is warm and cold, like ice melting. The sparks from the bonfire jump and spit, like firecrackers. Above, a gull is circling, white against blue.

- T.H., Sept. 25 ‘09

This is for my mom, who’s been asking for pictures for months now.  Took me a while, I know, but I finally got around to putting together a little slideshow.  (Don’t worry, unlike most home movies, it’s only 2:10 minutes long. More to come when the renovations are actually finished.) 

First time attempting such a thing, so there were a few glitches, but all in all I think it turned out okay.  A few of the photos seemed to get arbitrarily cropped in odd ways, and even though “show captions’ was selected I’m failing to see any, so if you have any questions about any stage in the process feel free to fire them my way. 

Hopefully the copyright police will utterly fail to notice that the music accompanying the video in question is by Belle & Sebastien.  I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t mind.

So much so, that he’s letting anyone who wants to pimp their literature of choice in this post here, just so he can laugh at them with that evil maniacal laugh of his.  Bastard.

The sad thing is, that I still haven’t read any of his books (unless you count a few chapters of that free online alien thingie).  But I did read Steven R. Boyett’s “Ariel” when I was a kid, which as Mr. Scalzi so nicely reminded us is back in print after more than a decade.  Very cool little story, one of the ones that stuck in my head, and can still be recalled in detail lo these many years later.  Don’t let the fact that there’s a unicorn in it throw you off, it’s actually quite urban and gritty and not at all fluffy.  Honest.

Editing to add, that one of the many links promoted in the 150+ comments was to this short story here (“Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store”), which is entirely worthy of reading.

I see Grond’s cat-drinking-from-tap and raise him one kitten-falling-asleep.

Let me explain… No, that would take too long.  Let me sum up…

See, a little over a year ago a certain madman was gripped by the overwhelming (some may say baffling) urge to blog every day for a year (the torch for which is now being carried by a strange but not at all scary monster over here).  Which, in turn, reminded me that I needed to get into the daily writing habit if I wanted to have any hope of becoming a real novelist with a capital N.  This little sideline challenge to myself started back on September 1st, 2008, and quietly slunk over the finish line on Sept. 2nd. 

The reason for the distinct lack of fanfare is partly due to the fact that it didn’t really feel like a particularly special day, just another day of writing as usual.  Which makes me think that perhaps the strategy might actually have worked, in that it has ingrained this odd little daily writing ritual into my bones, so that I feel rather peculiar if I don’t write on any given day.  (While this may be seen by some as an affliction, or possibly even a serious disorder, I myself see it as an accomplishment.  But then, crazy people never truly believe that they are crazy).

The lack of balloons and sparklers is also partly due to the sad fact that the 365 days were not technically all in a row.  There were, alas, two complete 24-hour stretches in which not a stitch of writing was done.  Now, I could say that I had valid excuses on both of these occasions (not the least of which was another death in the family, and the travelling to the funeral thereof).  But we all know that an excuse is just an excuse, no matter what you dress it up as, so there you have it. 

Now that we’ve tripped over into the new year, I figured a new challenge was in order.  From now on, the spiffy coloured sticklers only get slapped on the calendar if I’ve actually written part of a novel chapter, or at least edited part of a novel chapter.  Oh, there will definitely still be days that only see a few half-hearted scribblings in the journal-of-the-month, or some random surreal freefall short dashed off at four in the morning, but the focus will be on books – writing, polishing, and most importantly, FINISHING books.

Onward and upward, to infinity and beyond, and all that jazz.