Stories

Drip Drip Drip

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

There’s been something wrong with the showerhead all week, the valve not quite sealing no matter how tight you turn the knob. Not a big issue, not really, the landlord pays for the water, but …

It just keeps on dripping.

And dripping.

Drip.

Drops falling down to splatter on the tile floor, little bursts of watery noise echoing out through the closed door, falling and hitting and falling and hitting and—

Chamomile

“Be a dear and fetch my dancing body, will you? I feel like going out tonight.”

Cam doesn’t bother to reply to his nameless mxtress, not with his mainspring as deteriorated as it is; he just opens the closet and carefully pulls out the shell they want.

Each shell is different, dozens of bodies for every purpose they might possibly need: bodies for strength and speed and stealth, bodies for all the quiet arts of the courtroom and boudoir, bodies they haven’t worn in years and bodies worn thin from overuse.

Terri, with an i

The Witch of Forgotten Sounds (such an unwieldy title! She preferred to go by “Terri, with an i”) woke to find a doll in her bed.

An everyday occurrence for many witches, of course, but Terri made a point of not keeping dolls (“they’re always so busy, I can’t stand it!”).

She didn’t scream.

Witches are made of better stuff than that.

Instead she carefully untangled the doll’s limbs from her own, slipped out of bed, and stepped into her screaming room (a converted closet) to scream herself hoarse.

Caught

Precious little witch-to-be, caught in a trap—

Cold iron teeth cling to her ankle, slowly warming in her blood’s heat; she doesn’t have the strength to move, can’t drag herself across the smiling tiles. The door’s right there: those few feet might as well be miles.

She can’t think how this happened.

Just moments ago she was out on the street, wandering through autumn’s dripping red and yellow, just enjoying the season. Cold, crisp air filling her lungs and the warmth of her oversized caterpillar of a familiar around her neck.

After The Sigils Dry

(This story is also featured in my collection Joyous/Decay   )

For the last few months she’s asked you the same question every week.

“Are you sure you don’t want it to be a tattoo instead? Something permanent?”

Each time you answer more or less the same way. You’re sure, you really are; she doesn’t need to ask. You’d tell her if …

You’d tell her.

But you won’t need to.

Moonstruck Toys

Moonstruck toys staring up at pale silver eyes, lost in wonder as the sky’s thin shell cracks and the void rushes in …

Dolls can’t drown in the dark places Between, don’t fade away into dusty memories—but their gears seize up, and their screams find no purchase on the void.

Worlds crack like dying bubbles and spill their precious cargo out into cruel emptiness. They do exactly what they were made to do, and the things Outside eagerly drink them up.