[x]

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and WaitI don't know when we first went underground. I don't even know if it was one mass exodus, a swarm of mankind trickling through the earth's crust so vehement we carved our own caverns by the force of trampling feet, or whether it was a gradual process, perhaps even a repetitive one, a family here, a neighborhood there. For all I know, the echo of the damp subterranean machine has always reverberated off the cave walls, created long past by the Angels, who think of our well-being even while they shake their heads helplessly at our flaws.

They say that those who remained on the surface were raptured away in a great flash of light, like a millio

Apologies to LaoEach day is its own microstep--
since I woke from my mother's womb,
I longed to mimic new words, trammel
the sound until it blossomed

like a newborn, and oh how I birthed
stories--told them how I wanted
the author's sacrosanct title
once I've grown. But growing meant

learning the practice of citizens
and their due contribution: beast-slaying
nature of please, thank you,
an apology: sincere

or not. Then there is time--the first
breath of nine, exhalation
of five, the suffocating mandate
of overtime. You grow used to it:

the cyclical disappearance of parents,
pervasive need of sleep, a home-
cooked meal's gradual transmogrific

The Price of Dying“I want to be interred after I die,” Mr. Peters said. He made that clear to his family while he was still lucid, before old age and illness rendered him unintelligible. Seventy wasn’t that old, but he recognized the symptoms that were creeping up on his ailing body – the aches, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness and despair. Despite his daughter’s attempts to assuage his concerns, he sensed his own mortality.
The worst part about dying, Mr. Peters thought, was what happened afterwards. Even since he was a small boy, he had been afraid of fire. He could never forget the scorching heat of the orange flames searing his skin, the dark billowing smoke entering his nostrils. The time that his house burned down, the fire almost took him with it. How ironic then, to escape the fire only to be fed into it after death.
So one day, he sat his son and daughter down after dinner. “I want to be buried whole,” he said, emphasizing the

Survival of the IllestAre those hints of lemon I detect?
Look, I'm just here to get wasted, don't try
to make it more than that.

I'd drink motor oil if I thought
it could get me high; chase it with a shot
of antifreeze
so
you can keep your survival instincts,
locked up
in that pretty velvet box (along with all
those other things
you thought you could convince yourself
you lived for). Instincts are the bare
bones of the impossibilities we wanted
to believe in,
remember,
those times you tried to tell me that
adrenaline was God's way
of saying
that
we were His chosen ones, we were
special, we were free.
I tried to tell you that instincts an

Automatici.
"So where are you from?" The boy leans toward me, questions swimming in his eyes. I smile.

"Oh, I'm from Boston."

"No, I mean, where are you from?" My smile falters as I realize where this is going. It's an all-too familiar conversation, one I've been having since I was old enough to reply.

"Do you mean where was I born?"

"Yeah."

"I was born in China."

"Do you speak Chinese?"

"No."

"Does your family speak Chinese?"

"No."

He looks befuddled. I sigh.

"I'm adopted."

"Oh!" I see the light bulb over his head go off in a shower of sparks. "Do you know who your real parents are? Like, your real parents?" My temper flares. I stifle th

The Doppelganger 2The book still sings to me, and that's when I pull it from under my bed and stroke the cover. But I never open it, because I know what happens if I do it wrong. It's still blank; but only of ink. I know the secret, you see. It's how I understand the songs, and know the melodies it echoes up to me, through time. There are impressions hidden in the pages- spilled mead and raucous laughter, summer sunshine and frost on dead leaves. The last time I tried feeling them from start to finish, I passed out from the sheer weight of knowledge, and it left my brain scrambled for ages.

I found out things about my past and my family's past. I have Irish o

A Night at Pinetop's TavernSomewhere in the back alleys of the city's older section there was a crumbling brick building that had been around since before ragtime music was popular. Hanging above a faded green door that led down to the building's cellar was a wooden sign, and despite the peeling paint, you could still make out the bar's name: Pinetop's Tavern. Nobody really knew when Pinetop's first opened; local folks would tell you it had been there since time began, and the world had grown up around it. It was one of those places where the lighting was always dim and the cigarette smoke never dissipated and the cloud you were breathing now had probably been around

Never Told He thinks it's odd, sometimes, though he's not certain why.

A sense of dislocation, perhaps. Like cutting yourself on an unsharpened blade. He walks the immense aisles of the cathedral, footsteps echoing hollowly into the blue shadows of high vaulted ceilings and arches, stone figures watching him from above as he, in turn, watches dawn play across their carved and weathered faces. The grandeur of this place is oddly soothing in the solitude it affords him. A holy place, just hushed, here suspended in the silence after Mattins when most have shuffled out. It's a favorite moment of his, a favorite service to attend, and today it gives him p

The Nature of LungsThere's that
feeling
you get
when you
keep
breathing in and
are
so concerned with getting
air into
your lungs,
to fill them up
so fully
that
you'll never
need
to inhale again,
that you forget
about
breathing

out.

But when you do,
the emptiness feels
so
much better than all
the oxygen in the world
pressing out on that one
overcrowded lung.

the trouble isi'd like life to be
quiet and lovely
like distant church-bells
chiming through snow,
muted by the smell of
an old book and the
feel of a fire warming
me into my chair, and
a mug of tea, steeping
the moment in hushed
gratitude, easily in reach.

The Homeless Shelter     The morgue was colder than Douglas expected. He jammed his good hand into his pocket, but the fingers trapped in his cast were exposed. The cold bit into them, and he prayed they would go numb soon.

     “Detective,” the coroner said as he came out of his office. “How nice to see you again. But to be honest, you weren’t the detective I was expecting. Where is McKenzie?”

     “Probably hiding under his desk. I got roped into coming down here to talk to you.”

     “Hmm. I wonder what I could have done to make him avoid me. Well, no matter. I’ll be with you as soon as I finish signing these release forms. It’s always bittersweet, letting the corpses go to their loved ones. I feel like a bond has formed during our time together.”

     &

la musica dulceheartbeats are psycho-
-somatic, dear;
the ocean has swallowed
me whole.

hay una guitarra bajo
mi almohada, y
sueño de música cuando
estoy solo.

you came here with
city smoke in your lungs,
and i
forgot to breathe.

Down By The SchoolyardThere is a rather cliched phrase that states that some people live double lives. I have always found that to be an intensely misleading statement and I guess you can call it a bit of a pet peeve of mine. No one leads "double lives", they just lead fucking lives. That those lives are more complex that the singular one-track existence of lesser creatures shouldn't be a matter of duplicity, but of common sense. No one is exactly who they seem to be.

Julio is one of those who they would later say lived a double life, but it is no more true for him than anyone else. The difference in this case is that there are two of him, rather than one.

Perha

Russian RouletteThey take her on her honeymoon.

The wedding was lovely, or as lovely as it could have been with a couple that were more polite acquaintances than anything else and two sets of in-laws as stuffy as a dusty pile of money. They grab her when she sneaks out for a walk one night, two men, beefy, not even bothered to arm themselves. Her last thought before the bag is shoved over her eyes is to wonder how much this would ruin her parents' plans.

She comes to in a small brick room on a sallow mattress, windowless and lit by a cool yellow lamp. There's a man there, standing just outside the barred door.

"Kelly Shale," he says, voice nasally, greasy

Talking to YourselfWind drove snow over the trees with such force they seemed to step into the distance. The whiteness in the air covered everything until it was as faded as an old scent trail after a rainstorm. The snow was already deep enough to suck in a man's leg past the knee if he wasn't wearing snowshoes, but the figure trudging through it was no longer a man.

Wendigo had given up on snowshoes long ago in favor of simpler footwear. The straps challenged the clumsy fingers of his stolen human body, and he could never figure out how to move in them without tripping. He lurched onward with the tenacity of a wolverine gnawing through an inch of deer skull t

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adolescenceI am so tired tonight
I have become an immobile creature of granite
hunched over, fingers, eyes flickering.

Life has splintered into fragments:
i. She's confused and kisses in the dark are nice but the morning always comes and dawn is not soft in winter, it is harsh and pulls you out of your bed with icy needles of sunlight and reality
ii. I am lost and I'm so young but I feel so old and I don't want to grow up and I am finally understanding why poets have always written about sex…but also why they write of the forgotten kingdom of childhood and how we yearn for it even as that ancient fire is lit in the hearth of our bellies

I Cannot Forget.I am a modern girl;
I debate complexities.

I get migraines.
Or something.

I don't know, either way I'm used to the cold sterile
of doctor's waiting rooms
and the bitter bite of medication.

There was a time, about a year ago, now
when even the thought of a germ
made me scrub my hands raw.

I have no qualms about describing myself as such;
this is who I am, I cannot pretend to be my sister
with her proud, broad, sunburnt fisherwoman's face
or my father, and his hands that can soothe panicking horses
and create order out of metal chaos, make something
that moves out of piles of bolts and puddles of black
sticky oil on t

there are words i want to shoutSo what is life?

Life is nausea.

Life is music late at night that hurts my temples and my heart.

Life is a boy that I want to discover.

Life is a girl that I'm trying to forget.

finding myself alone…

lots of people talk, but who really says anything to me?

I find solace in glowing things, and god help me, I am good for nothing. My chest always hurts and no doctor could help me with this one, it's nothing physiological, and I've always liked things that are diagnosable, and this is not. My brain likes to organize everything and shut it up in little boxes but the manual I've written for myself says nothing of this pain and sleeping

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001. beginnings.

by ~Meggie272, Aug 17, 2011, 2:27:11 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / Fantasy / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

Beginnings are vague things. Quite often you can't pin them down to one event – you have to trawl back further and further through foggy past, peeling apart what ifs and untangling strands of memories.

Eventually one has to go all the way back to the start of the universe, and that's a question even the experts have to shrug their shoulders at. It's not like you can plug it into a calculator and come out with a balanced algorithm. At least, not yet.

But it is true that sometimes you can fasten down an occurrence or a moment or even just a single breath, like sticking a thumbtack through a dead butterfly, and label it as a 'beginning' in your mind. Identifying that one moment makes us feel secure, like maybe it was destined to happen instead of just being a random sequence of events that fed off each other and tripped over each other and eventually fell like dominoes to the unlikely conclusion.

Cvusscha Mistbane has pinned down a moment. Of course she knows that there are plenty of other moments that led to this moment, but this is the one she chose. She thinks that the moment she stood on shaky legs in front of the burning shell of her house was where her story began. Her cheeks were impossibly hot and her lungs were filled with dragging, choking smoke and the roof had just caved in with a dreadful, apocalyptic crash and blaze of sparks. All for a sword, a mere thing, made by man and used by man and nothing but steel. Her friend had said, "Come away now, Vuss. Come away. There's nothing you can do."

And she'd thought: No. No, there is something I can do. And I'm going to do it.

That's the beginning, in her head.

It led to finally leaving her home and having a heart full of anger and purpose (they balanced each other, kept each other burning and never sputtered out). It led to her standing before the greatest hero in the land and then meeting someone who definitely wasn't a hero at all but turned out to be the only person she'd ever really trust (or even love, if you wanted to go down that track). It led to her dancing with the faeries and slapping a vampire across his aristocratic fine-boned face and it led to her bringing down an entire kingdom. It led to her saving her grandfather, at least for a little while, and it led to justice and redemption and it led to her finally achieving something.

So yes, beginnings are vague things and technically don't really exist at all. But sometimes you can ignore the philosophy, and you can choose your beginning, and keep it in your mind, and remember it always, even when your bones ache and your hair is silver and your hands are thin and trembly, with visible veins like bluey-purple highways.

001. beginnings.by ~Meggie272

Literature / Prose / Fiction / Fantasy / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

So I found this table of 100 writing promts over here: [link]

I'm so doing it.

This is what I came up with for prompt number 1, "Beginnings". Character mentioned is Cvusscha Mistbane, my own OC, and it won't make any sense to you at all if you're not one of the few who aren't familiar with the plot of my story "Barmaid's Quest".

Hope you enjoy anyway.

EDIT: I was pleasantly shocked to find this old piece getting a DD. Totally unexpected, but lovely! Thanks so much to

for suggesting it, and

for featuring it.

Daily Deviation

Given 2013-01-21

~Meggie272 creatively encompasses a life story in 001. beginnings. As the suggester notes, "readers, writers and artists can all take something from its few words." ( Suggested by *xlntwtch and Featured by ^neurotype )

love 1 1

joy 1 1

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*xlntwtch Jan 23, 2013 Writer

...

~Meggie272 Jan 23, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

THANK YOU!

*xlntwtch Jan 23, 2013 Writer

You're welcome.

~lightningresonance Jan 21, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Geeeez what a great concept!

~Meggie272 Jan 22, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Thank you!

~ShineeSerenDipity Jan 21, 2013 Student Writer

I like this short summary, it's got a lot of imagery and a lot of themes to think on. And I love the style that it's written in, very engaging. Well done!

~Meggie272 Jan 22, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Oh wow, thank you so much

~ShineeSerenDipity Jan 22, 2013 Student Writer

Of course, keep it up!

~Aikuna Jan 21, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

This is lovely, excellent work here!

~Meggie272 Jan 22, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Thank you!

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001. beginnings.by ~Meggie272

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