Wednesday Words: Good Skin

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go.

The First Dragon had died. Dragons do not stop growing, and he carried eons within him. He became more weathered, slower in his thoughts and words. Every thought was a deep, slow thought, because with so much memory, and so much wisdom, a thought had to travel a long way.

Eventually he passed from the world, as all things must. He felt relief, for who could follow him through such thoughts? He had been lonely.

Dragons also do not decay. The inkwyrms, those who prepared the dead, who recorded the words, deeds and songs of the dragons who died, took up their needles and their drills. He had outgrown his scales, and that was fortunate. There was a lot of ground to cover, and prying up scales takes time.

Underneath, he was just soft enough for them to begin their work.

They would record each of those long, slow thoughts on this good skin.

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Post-Drabble Thoughts: do dragons only start out as fire elementals, and end as stone elementals? That is how planets are born: they begin as fire, and end as stone, with their history buried in their skin.

(yes, I’m taking some artistic liberties with astrophysics. Hush.)

Wednesday Words: Destination

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? This one was more recent, and I got two in the time limit that I liked.

Destination #1

The destination is the same, always. It’s only the starting point that’s different.

How far off-shore?

How far from the equator?

How far from the punishing swell of the Southern Ocean?

How far from the agricultural run-off? How far from the thoughtless discards of humanity? How far from the bleaching heat? How far from all the tourists?

(the other tourists. My own hypocrisy burns me.)

Can I find a place where the destination is still here?

I know it when I get there. It’s always the same.

My breath deepens. My heart slows.

The destination is always, always down.

Destination #2

The new recruits are always anxious. They seem lost. The zero-gravity halls fill them with apprehension. They worked hard to get here, and they’re fierce. They’re determined.

But we were born with heavy bones, with muscles that work to push us upwards.

When we get to space, evolution is done. We’ve reached the top.

I tell them, Earth was the centre. You had a destination. That destination was the same, no matter where on Earth you came from. What was it?

It takes them a moment.

Up.

Well, I say. That’s still your destination. How can you be lost?

Wednesday Words: Bubbles

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? The Drabble prompt on this was “Bubbles.”

We find them by their breath, the wraiths, the lost ones. They are not like us.

Our songs travel for miles, but our breaths are silent. If we move close to the surface, where the moonlight can find us, a shaft of silver flashes off a scale and that light will wink like a star, but we breathe the water, in and out, and leave no visible trace.

Light that can catch a scale can just as easily find those strange undulating spheres, hurtling unevenly up towards the crest of the wave.

That is a breath, you see.

Oh, it could be a sign of passage – when we twirl our flukes for speed, crafting a vortex that moves water so swiftly that the slipstream separates water and air, for just a moment – but these are not slipstream bubbles.

These are breaths.

There are so few of them.

We dive, judging the depth and the speed by the size of that breath. The bubbles are small when they emerge, perfect spheres hemmed in by the weight of the sea. As they travel up towards the moon, they expand and begin to flap about in panic, flaccid sacks of air.

And they break. They break into smaller pieces, hammered by the movement of the currents and their own helpless buoyancy.

We know the breaths far better than we ever know the breathers.

When we find them – if we find them – just as that last breath emerges, we can catch it in our own lips, and it shall be the first note of the next song we sing, and then they will be like us.

Their breath will be silent, and their scales will shine, like stars in the sea.

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