Stories

In A Quiet Café

It’s not HER, of course, not even one of HER acolytes; just some thing with a long-beaked mask wearing one of HER lesser aspects. But It’s still the closest you’ve ever gotten to HER, the closest you can safely get, and Its presence is intoxicating—

Or maybe that’s just what you Know is inside the slim briefcase sitting on the floor next to It.

It’s tapping Its pen on the table, waiting, the last drops of blood draining from the attached no-longer-sterile lancet—

Catalyst

It takes more hits to break the glass than you expected, but you always were weak, and it doesn’t help that you’re so worried about overcommitting and tearing your arm open.

When it finally breaks you knock the fragments out of the frame before reaching in to unlock the door.

It’s weird being here at night, when the store is quiet and dark; the soft glow of an exit sign pulses above you, reflecting off the countless shelves which line the space. The jars and vials which fill them almost to bursting shimmer like prisms in the light.

The Doll Decides

The doll, returning to her first witch’s home, finds it barren and empty; the sprawling gardens overgrown, elegant flowers choked out by thorny weeds, junk littering the gate and the path beyond it—the great fountain, once golden with angelblood, now full of stinking trashbags.

The doll picks her way up along the path, looking around in wonder at the changes decay has wrought; at the places where she once sat and played, at the broken trees and sculptures—tools of discipline which she once shivered to see, now nothing more than rubble and ash.

Portmeirion

You were taken in the night from a dream of endless roses; when you woke you looked to your hands, thinking to see the depredations of thorns. Instead of bloodstained sheets you found smooth glossy walls and a space no larger than a coffin, lit by the rhythmic pulse of a single light—a rhythm which, it soon became clear, matched the frantic beating of your heart.

When the lid finally opened you came out fighting, clawing at the smooth, featureless faces of the creatures attending you. You broke half your nails on them before they moved to restrain you, and was over as soon as they did. You could no more stay their motions or escape their grip than you could still your heart or quiet your panicked breaths; so you did what you could, and slipped away from your body to watch what would happen next.

it feels like floating and a bit like dying

Warm slime puddles thickly around your legs as you kneel before her, as her body emerges from all the tiny cracks in the walls where she’d hidden herself all, welling up from the gaps in the courtyard’s paving stones and the shadows beneath rocks.

A tiny piece of her even emerges from the tight tie holding your hair back, leaving a warm trail down the small of your back as it descends to return to its proper home.

Of Decay

(this story hurt to write; I cannot say whether it will hurt to read, but please don’t force yourself to.)

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The witch treasured her dolls more than anything else, more than all her wealth and power. She crafted them from the finest components, beautiful souls carefully freed from failing flesh and woven through with threads of memory and love; each one a testament to her devotion.

For a time this love was even reflected in the title the world gave her, that welled up from the strength of her workings and the marks she left around her.

Drink Some More Tea

There’s just something about the way it growls—that hungry, needy sound. It almost makes you want to unchain it, to let it feed the need roiling in its belly with your tender flesh.

But the witch wouldn’t want you to.

She put in so much effort to capture this beast, this strange shifting thing; to bind its wings and cuff its many limbs.

So you don’t. No matter how it growls when you blend close—when you clip another flower from its antlers, or bring the shears to its fingers to harvest another bit of the precious sap inside—no matter what that noise stirs inside you.