Tiptoe Writes!

(From Seventh Sanctum’s Symbolitron generator: The fantasy story where the races map to the four seasons (spring-summer-autumn-winter). Purple prose, yes, but stream of consciousness with very little revision.)

It was winter for the spring people in that time.

This Alaka had told me when I began to ask why the flowers were made of stone, why the birds neither flew nor sang but waddled in the courtyards like undersized oxen. Alaka held my hand as we walked over the cobblestones and said not to look. But I looked. How could I not? We the summer people never mitigate our gaze. Like the sun we are harsh and unblinking, but we are above all just. So Alaka may develop a frost and her eyes may fall to the earth like the leaves of the autumn trees. I was not so temperate.

When she brought me home, put me into the bath, her eyes gained that faraway tint and that is what she told me: It was winter for the spring people. It was their time to be cut down, for their powers of creation and birth had gone beyond a blessing to a nuisance and beyond a nuisance to a stifling curse that threatened to destroy all that had come before.

And so the winter people came, pouring down from the sky in their white robes with their spears of ice, and they did what winter does and killed. And now there is no one left to call forth a flower or bid a bird to fly, and we of summer and autumn live in the squalid aftermath of our own excess.

This makes me weep, but I can no more shrink from the truth than the sun can blink her summer’s eye.

(Prompt-a-day: Force was necessary)

He had to muscle his way through the throng. It wasn’t his favorite thing to do, but sometimes, especially this time of year, force was necessary to survive the overflowing mass of shoppers. So paying no heed to the moms and kids, the frantic fretting and cries and giggles silenced, he threw out elbow and knee with abandon, doing his best to drag his frame along the endless aisle to the front of the store. It wasn’t easy, especially with this piece of crap weighing him down, but a man had to do what a man had to do to pay the bills. So groaning and grumbling and cursing under his breath, he arrived, sat down, and fixed the child in front of him with the meanest of glares. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said flatly. “And what do you want for Christmas?”

That had been the most stunning thing about getting here, she noted as she climbed the steep hill with slow, trudging steps. Not how her apartment had been full of pastel plastics with bizarre uses. Not how the neighbors had left a package full of soap and laundry detergent on her stoop. It was the sheer number of torii. Not that every place was like Fushimi Inari, with hundreds and hundreds. But here, there was another, wedged between two modest homes. And earlier there had been one sitting in the middle of a rice field, like it was a lone boat on the ocean. And another greeted her across the road from the train station, next to a hardware store. A hardware store, of all places! Torii here, torii there. Sometimes not even on a full shrine. The one she was facing now was just a single altar by the roadside. Sometimes wood painted and shiny, sometimes plain gray stone. The country was speckled with torii like delicious candy-coated freckles. Just seeing them gave Jane a boost, and she raised her chin defiantly as she ascended to the crest of the hill.

The school was a rickety building with two floors that looked like the slightest jarring would pancake them together. As Jane approached the grounds, the chicken-clucking of idle chatter from the endless folds of pleated skirts and dangling strands of hair hushed. Dozens of dark-eyed faces turned to her for a brief moment of incredulity, and then the schoolyard noise returned in earnest.

A boy with gel-spiked hair and drumsticks of arms poking through the threadbare elbows of his uniform fell into an easy glide next to her. “Harroh,” he said, grinning. His teeth were crooked.

“Hello,” Jane answered politely. She hovered in indecision for a moment, then decided to take advantage of his interest to ask directions to the principal’s office. “Kohchoh-sensei no jimusho wa doko deshou ka?”

This brought a gasp from the boy that faded into a croak as he opened his mouth too wide. Jane disregarded him and strode through the main entrance. She’d find it herself.

Sean came out from the shooting with shaking fists. “What the hell?” He slammed a fist into the soda machine before he caught her staring.

“I wouldn’t buy a soda from that machine for a week or so if I were you,” she said, watching it vibrate on its heavy haunches.

“How could you write that? What kind of sicko are you?” he demanded.

She tilted her head. “The kind of sicko who writes screenplays,” she said calmly. “What bothered you so much about it?”

“What both–” He sputtered. “What kind of woman is that? I can see where her son got his DNA!”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” she frowned.

“Maybe not,” he said crossly, “but it’s nothing comparing to blaming that poor girl for driving her husband to drink!”

She smiled. “Who else is she going to blame? Her son’s nowhere to be found, and here’s this girl claiming he hurt her. She’s a mother. Who’s she going to believe, her son by blood or her daughter-in-law?”

“She has to know what kind of person he is,” Sean argued.

“Maybe she does,” she said. “But he’s not around for her to yell at, now is he?”

He stared at her a moment. “You’re telling me she’s just blaming her because she’s the only one there?”

She returned his stare. “Sean,” she said gently. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

(Three Word Wednesday prompt: Empty; Highway; Ignored)

A heavy gray mist hung over the highway like the shawl of an old woman over twisted and knobbled knots of her spine. Gray on gray, concrete and exhaust smoke, incorporeal and immutable, wrapped around each other in a dance of the depressing. The grass tufting along like a stalled train seemed almost obscene for its streak of green, although it was the mist’s wet touch that dyed it that color.

A hitchhiker stood, wearing a faded white cotton shirt and slinging a sagging, empty backpack from his shoulder. A sore thumb, sticking out his own sore thumb. In the not-nearly-dawn stillness, he was the only thing moving. Pretty soon the first of the day’s trucks would push through the curtain of gray and rumble by, shattering the stillness with the mighty groan of tires and perhaps the clear, flat blare of a horn. And the hitchhiker would be ignored for the first time, but not the last, that day.

Now, Jane used to call herself Joan, for no other reason than she thought Jane was far too token a name. She didn’t want to share a name with Mary Janes, or plain Janes, or Jane Doe. And it was funny, because Jane was as plain as you could get. She had the brown hair for which the word mousy was coined, and she wore it close to her skull and manageable. She’d never met a blowdryer she spent more than five seconds with. Showers were a waste of time, when there was so much else in the world she’d rather be doing.

Mostly, Jane would rather be teaching. From girlhood, when she sat on the steps of the living room teaching her younger sister Lauren to read at age 2, she’d found her niche, her sense of importance, from being the one who knew things. It made her an expert and a role model, and it made prettier eyes than her own shine at her, despite the dullness of her complexion. Maybe she didn’t look like much, but Jane was worth something when she could teach.

The other thing she enjoyed was puzzling. She was off of regular crosswords and onto cryptics by the time she was 15; by the time sudoku started being popular in the United States, she was bored by most of the regular ones and sought out new varieties. It was sudoku, in fact, that cemented her love for Japan, despite the fact that in the country itself, it was never called sudoku; that wouldn’t be nearly exotic enough for the foreign-stuff-loving Japanese. No, they had to name it in English: Number Place, or nanpure for short. But that was too boring for American publishers, who had to invent a Japanese name for the puzzle. Who knew. Maybe by now Japanese people had picked up the American name for it. It certainly must sound at least as exotic as the English equivalent.

But it wasn’t sudoku that was the origin of Jane’s Japanophilia. No, that honor belonged to a photograph she’d seen when she was twelve. It looked like an outdoor tunnel, leafy green background suffused with sunlight and through the middle of it all, an endless set of orange gates like train tracks. They looked like pi symbols, or top-heavy letters H, and there was just one after another after another for what must have been miles. Jane was sure that if she ever found that place in the real world, it would transport her into another dimension entirely. And she wasn’t the type who thought much about other dimensions. She’d just never seen anything quite so otherworldly in her life.

The photo, she learned later, was of Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, and the gates were called torii. Literally, “the place where the birds alight.” Jane started flapping her wings that very day, confident that if she just tried hard enough and flew far enough, she, too, would be able to alight atop the gate to a Shinto shrine and find her opening to another dimension.