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.

A Flower in the Silence

Someone has left a flower in the silence between moments, that secret place where you long ago learned to go to hide from the world. A place which you had always thought only you could access.

Because, well. It’s inside your mind. Right?

The flower is pale, almost immaterial. It looks like a pencil sketch.

You gingerly pick it up and sniff.

It doesn’t smell like anything. Which does make sense—smells have always been the hardest things to imagine with any sort of accuracy—but it’s still a bit disappointing.

Once You Were Given Purpose

As you raise the wand above your head and scream the magic words, something already feels different. The swirling ribbons burst forth from the wand’s gem, just as they always do, filling everything around you—but they are sharp and purple, not those familiar soft pastels.

The ribbons fray as they stretch, and soon you are surrounding by a sharp-edged cloud, sparkling in the light seeping from your wand—that, at least, is familiar, though it trickles forth in anemic bursts. Gone is the brilliant guiding light that once blazed around you, as warm and overwhelming as the sun; the power that settles into you is broken, distorted, just as you will soon be—for the torn ribbons which were once the flesh and bone of your other form, that bouncing skirt and frilly gloves (that ridiculous half-cape and the thin leather strap around your neck), have not remembered their purpose.

The Chalice

When she offers you the chalice, the liquid within tastes like nothing you can recall tasting before—a heady blend of hothouse flowers, their sweetness tainted by the humid decay of their growth, and thunderstorm petrichor, all shot through with a thick and hungry musk.

You swirl it on your tongue, trying to understand the scents seeping up into your mind; your eyes close for a moment, and when they open she has left your side, gone over to busy herself at the stove, suspiciously nonchalant. She doesn’t look at you, but she doesn’t need to.

Untitled Story About a Knife

When she first took a knife to herself, she did not think to find anything more than the release of pain; so she was quite surprised, not to say a bit taken aback, when the knife’s passage through too-rough flesh was interrupted by the wholly unexpected presence of a gearbox, a plastic-sheathed assemblage quietly ticking away just before her wrist’s joint.

When she was done being astonished—done listening to the gears and seeing how her fingers twitched when she poked at it—she went looking for more.

Untitled Story About Angels

When scientists first started experimenting with genetically programmed radical body plan modifications (which isn’t what they called it—they had a catchy acronym and a billion-dollar PR firm and everything you don’t), the first dozen generations did not go particularly well.

They jabbed needles into eggs and grew monsters: pathetic, mewling things with their bones on the outside or no bones at all, with the wrong number of limbs or the wrong number of hearts, things which were little more than bundles of cancer clawing at the womb that held them.