I drummed my fingers on the table beside her open grimoires. Not facing the bully, I turned my eyes toward the blonde, taking in her arrogant smile. She'd gotten me to do what she wanted. She held her wand steady, and the tip glowed like hot iron. "And that's all I need to do? I can't believe you're helping me like this after all we've been through..."
The bucket-full of water and me being hit by said bucket falling off the shelf above the door. The vanishing ink pen I used on a test. The worms in my box lunch. Other things. But I was also a T.A. Some responsibilities where inescapable.
I did volunteer to help Jill.
I wanted to laugh at the "we" in that last sentence, but sighed instead. She was predictable. Very predictable. "The mnemonic, the equations, the visualization. Spot on. It balances and your wand indicates that."
"So all I have to do is say what I want to conjure?"
Predictable. I didn't grin. Instead I switched to French, hopeful. "/Tu m'emmerdes avec tes questions!/"†
She blinked. "Merde? Isn't that French for—"
With magic you really need to be specific about where to target a spell affect and what you're asking for. She'd been specific about neither.
Where your wand is pointing is the default. Her's pointed above her head.
The spell understood what she wanted enough that the closest source proved to be the horse stables. I could see it out the dorm room window. The spell mucked every stall.
A load of small round spheres crashed down around her, bouncing off her head and bounding around the room. I squealed reflexively and jumped away.
I doubled over leaning against the door, laughing despite the smell. For her part, the bully sat stunned. Her expression wanted to be a smile. She had succeeded, after all. She also knew she'd been made the fool.
Exiting out the door was the better part of valor. I grabbed the nob.
"/Amélie/," came a growl.
=-=-=-=-=
† "You're so annoying with your questions!" Literally: "You're shitting on me with your questions."
Yesterday, one market called #SpellCheck an AI and does not want your work if you use spell check. Doesn't every #Author use spell (and grammar) check?
Another claims if they suspect the story is AI, they will block your email, and not even reply or verify.
#Autistic, #Blind, #DeafBlind, cognitively disabled, and people for whom English is a second language will be left forever waiting on a reply.
Jenny Erpenbeck opens #Spring 2024 with Sloughing Off One Skin, a haunting #ShortStory that explores truth and identity, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Narrow 2 way street. Cars parked asking the kerb on far side. I see a car coming towards me, I'm on my bike. I say nothing, no signal, but stop to let him go, although he's going onto the wrong side of the road. He gets to me, winds down his window. "Wha' de fuck are you talking about? Fucking cycle on de footpath ya c**t"
Charming. #dublin#shortStory#autobiography#talesFromTheWorldOfRonan
Robert Louis Stevenson’s #shortstory “The Bottle Imp” was first published (in English) #OTD, 8 Feb 1891, in the New York Herald. It was originally published in #Samoan translation as “O le Fagu Aitu” in the missionary magazine O le sulu Samoa (The Samoan Torch)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
Dear #women of Mastodon, give me the worst insult a male boss or colleague has ever given you, and I will make those the last words my character in a #shortstory utters before a large pair of Mayo disection scissors are embedded up to the handles in his chest by Hildi, the pathologist
Dear #blind mastadonians, I am busy with a #wip for a #shortstory that has a blind character, and if you would like to beta read to make sure I am getting it right, please ping me.
Likewise, if you would like to be a character in a future short story, ping me.
The stories typically get published at Physician's Weekly without any registration or payment requirements.
New FREE Short Story: TOWER GIRLS 🌈🌱#solarpunk
(Halfway to Better 2)
A cute technician keeps breaking things in her too-shiny lab, then calling a fixer in for repairs. Zita’s a certified member of the International Guild of Repair Workers, Local 772, and she’s certain this hot girl is breaking her toys on purpose. But why? Something very sexy but very weird is going on…
“Of aal the fish there iss in the sea,” said Para Handy, “nothing bates the herrin’; it’s a providence they’re plentiful and them so cheap!”
Neil Munro (1863–1930) – journalist, novelist, short-story writer, & poet – was born #OTD, 3 June. Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of Herring discusses Munro’s PARA HANDY stories, as well as giving the full text of the tale “The Herring – A Gossip”
In the middle of rewriting a #horror#ShortStory I wrote a decade ago. Looks like the word count will be reduced by a third and easier to send to submissions.
Honestly I can't read through the original one anymore, it feels way too long now. I padded my old stories with dialogue because that was my comfort zone. Now it has nearly no dialogue and it's distilled to its purest form of weird insanity.
Since my memory is failing and Google isn't any better, I'm going to #askFedi for some #fediHelp finding the title and author of a #SciFi#ShortStory featuring a #timeLoop: “they” suddenly appear wish spaceships on the edges of the Solar System and with no warning wipe out the outer colonies. Earth quickly sets up a space navy to face the unknown enemy, but as the enemy approaches Earth it stops fighting and is easily defeated.
Ok, i need a #betareader for a #toxicology#shortstory about the untimely death of Dr. Patrice Piebald, who angered a lot of people, and died three times as a result.
Since we are talking R.S., it has to be what inspired the character.
My WiP is as mechanically constructed as you can get. I realized my character had a half-year where nothing happened between stories, and that got me thinking.
The difficulty here it that because it would be both a sequel and a prequel, I needed the story to have a reason never be reported while still being knock your socks off. Something that could still be shoehorned into later stories with a phrase like "Oops, that's a state secret. Don't repeat that," and not cause a disruption.
(I actually did. You know. Shoehorn that line into a later story, before completing this WiP.)
So what ideas did I throw at the wall?
An invasion of Earth nobody knew about (which comes from five chapters I never continued). My devil-girl had to had to stop it. I wanted to make it useful for ongoing stories by getting the devil-girl back on the main antagonist' radar by my devil-girl inadvertently doing the MA an enormous solid (i.e., saving Her ass).
Check. Check Check.
Didn't quite take off. My devil-girl wasn't biting. What was the story idea missing?
Friday! I didn't have to browbeat the kids into doing their homework that evening--I have the whole weekend for that.
I wore my winter coat to the kid's bus stop. So when I also accidentally locked myself out of the house ... I didn't freeze. It was only mildly inconvenient to wait for Phil's rescue with his keys.
Publication! A Halloween-themed quarterly anthology, including my "You Are in the Heart of the Corn Maze."
The first tattoo I ever saw done was an initiation tattoo for a gang.
Tattooing in my life has only been commercial for short periods at a time. When I had to leave LA the first time, for instance, I went through a period where I walked to the local white hipster American traditional shop and got flash from an artist I thought was cute once every two weeks pretty much without fail. No matter how hard I tried, though, it never gave me the feeling that the tattoos I saw in my youth gave me. Commercial tattooing is necessarily void of communal initiation, void of rites of passage, void of the sense that you earned it.
And I don't intend to diminish the incredible artistry and skill in commercial tattooing. There are millions of artists in the world far, for more masterful at this medium than I, that's for sure. I'd be honored to learn from any one of these new masters I'm sure. Theirs are not clients who want the things I've mentioned, their clients are art collectors: ever more discerning and ambitious. And they themselves are artists. True artists, worthy of their title.
But the rest of my life was spent at barrio "tattoo shops" -- studios in someone's house, a homemade kit pulled out in a car. Or the real shops that made it through the ringer of county and city health codes and existed legitimately, masters of black and grey slinging ink for kings and captains of war. Masters who learned in alleyways and cars, their own garages, or from other masters who made it to legitimacy from their own set (of these there are many). These were artists, and holy men. Keepers of knowledge, of stories, keepers of titles. The marks they gave had power beyond the ability of most of you to comprehend.
But I'd left this world, this life. I lived suspended in a different one, suspended in a different culture. The last correspondence with a friend who'd gone to jail told me that she'd rather be where she was than where I was: invisible, a life erased. Attempting and failing mostly to integrate into a society I phenotypically passed into but for whom my attempts at assimilation were always discordant and wrong. She said that at least in prison she still had respect.
I've wanted to engage in the sacred practice of tattooing since I was 13 years old, but never knew how to start. Those willing to be my mentors were long gone, the path to survival ultimately took me from the path to my purpose. I sought new mentors in commercial shops, but never seriously. For those years I didn't have much to say, for those years I was mostly silent. I could never ask for what it was I needed.
A few years ago a mentor was sought: someone with a background kind of like mine, but she doesn't know it completely. But she wasn't ready, because she's too good. She's a master because she knows there is always so much more to learn.
But she told me to read, and I read the canon. The canon reads of sailors and circus freaks, punks and soldiers, and it's wonderful. But it's reductive, it's culturally incomplete. It largely ignores tens of thousands of years of Indigenous tattooing, tattooing that looked a lot more like what I grew up with.
I had this revelation, then, that I would not join the ranks of commercial tattooers. That my purpose was not, after all, to work a bed in a shop. I learned on a machine, because coil machines were friendly to me, but I quickly became obsessed with just a needle in my hand.
And this practice of mine grew from memory, from the advice of people I love, people who are much better artists than I and who practice professionally. And also from the advice of ghosts, people who once saw wide eyes and who invited me in to see how they worked. People who told stories of prison tattoo rites, who told stories of war, and who passed into these stories forever to be remembered by the survivors.
My client list stays small for these reasons, because ultimately I am not the person you come to when you just want something beautiful and grand on your skin. I am the person you come to when you want to commemorate a rite of passage with drumbeats and incense and bleeding, when you want to meditate or cry or pray while you go through this ritual. I am the person you come to when you understand what all this means, and when you are searching for spiritual initiation, and when you've earned it.
If you follow me, you have a sense of humour. If you're reading this, you're a reader. I’ve put this story online, free, gratis and for nothing, it's a twelve minute read. If you like it, maybe you’ll be curious enough to risk 99p for one of my short story collections. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to save some money by buying a compilation. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to buy my novel. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy ‘Vincent'. http://aarondavid.co.uk/Vincent.html#freeread#shortstory#funny#pleaseboost
This may be a silly question, but how does one actually read short story collections? Is it the same as if reading a novel? Do you put the book down between every story? Do you look for connections between the stories? Am I supposed to read them linearly?