Wednesday Words: Good Things Can Come From Mistakes

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.

Mistakes #1

Cell division is a glorious microscopic ballet.

A dancer’s silhouette is revealed from an artful smoke machine; so too does our genetic material coalesce from the organised chaos of the nucleus into chromosomes.

Diligently, they twin themselves, then separate, pulled to opposite ends of the stage; and then the stage itself splits in two, and you don’t see that shit in Swan Lake.

But the most miraculous part of all this is how much it gets fucked up and you still end up with a human being at the end of it.

Only now you’ve got red hair. You’re welcome.

Mistake #2

A weed is any plant that grows where you don’t want it to grow. It’s a context-specific term. A mistake is to do something when you intended something else.

An error is a computer telling you to go fuck yourself, because you’re speaking gibberish (as far as the computer is concerned).

What do you get when you combine these things?

Well, I got a sarcastic cyborg plant person, and after 50 magical years of marriage, I don’t regret a single thing.

Coda: I posted this on tumblr as well – I always do – and on tumblr the devil is not so much in the details as scattered liberally through the tags and I went on a journey with this one. Indulge me as I cross the streams!

#every living organism is a filthy mutant and we really don’t say that often enough
#mutation is the raw material of evolution
#most mutations either do nothing or render the developing organism nonviable
#some mutations do multiple things and it’s real weird strap in
#the mc1r gene is expressed in the skin and there’s a version that codes for red hair and increased melanoma risk dammit but guess what
#that same mutation is expressed in the brain and affects pain perceptions and analgesic response
#more tolerant of many kinds of pain
#more sensitive to hot/cold pain
#varying levels of resistances to local analgesics
#seriously my dentist has to give me like 3x the amount and she tried to trick me just to confirm
#so this is what I mean when I say mutation is the raw material of evolution and all of it is a mistake in some aspect of cell replication
#this means that you are a good thing that came from many many mistakes
#feel proud
#I’m not sure how this plays into the sarcastic cyborg plant person but I am picturing a steampunk triffid rolling its eyes

Wednesday Words: Apocalypse Edition

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 theme for this particular Wednesday was Apocalypse, and the prompt for the drabble was “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Everywhere.”

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Everywhere

At the end of the rainbow, there’s a pot of gold.

At the end of the world, there’s a rainbow.

We sit in the ruins, the radiation rising around us, a haze of inevitable death. I sip my tea. The sun is low in the sky. In the distance, a forest is barely visible – a surviving forest, without the withered and blasted trees that surround us.

My companion leans over and turns off the Geiger counter, and picks up his guitar. He plays. I sing. For now, that is enough.

At the end of the rainbow, there is a forest.

Wednesday Words: A Dash of Magic

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 is one of my favourites.

PS yes I know it is not Wednesday anywhere right now, I have dropped the ball on this for a couple weeks, so enjoy the Friday edition! I will go schedule a couple more Wednesdays now…

A Dash of Magic

An ordinary night. An ordinary hill. An ordinary girl. Her ordinary dog.

An ordinary breeze hushes through ordinary leaves.

An ordinary planet spins fast enough to hold together, but its ordinary rotation cannot be felt.

The ivory light from an ordinary moon over an ordinary horizon, glittering silver fire from ordinary stars. Ordinary galaxies wheel overhead. In that blackness lies an ordinary vastness, an ordinary void, containing ordinary gravitational masses that bend light.

Ordinary fingers curl to scratch a canine ear, marvel at ordinary silken fur.

Ordinary brown eyes half-close in pleasure.

There is nothing ordinary about any of this.

Wednesday Words: Dusk or Dawn

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 is the second one and I still had not actually twigged to the word limit! The theme that night was “Liminal Spaces”, thresholds where one thing becomes another thing – the specific drabble prompt was Dusk or Dawn.

The sand is cool and soft, barely an echo of the day’s heat lingering to warm my feet. In a few hours, it will be burning with cold, but I will be long gone by then. There will be footprints, there in the sand, until the wind lets go the breath that it is holding and fills them in.

For a moment, I hesitate, thinking on what I plan to do.

It’s said by some that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

My guardian once told me that perception is nine-tenths of reality, but I surpassed her three lifetimes ago, and I know this: perception is the whole of reality.

I am done with this place. I know where I need to be. I know how to get there.

You find the place between.

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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