Ethan’s world had been reduced to his front sight, the rest was bloody chaos. A perfect glimpse of a single blade of grass.
In a hurricane.
The pistol was a thunderclap.
Blood sprayed like a fountain.
The bullet found its mark.
Sanctuary part 2
“Get up!” Ethan shouted, trying to be heard above the blaring trumpet sound. He started to rise, then stumbled back to the weeds and cracked pavement as the street seemed to lurch up to meet him. The small brick building next to him simply collapsed on itself without warning. His group slid and lurched away from the wreckage, up against the wall of the opposite building trying to keep out of the spreading dust. The ground brick billowed into the street, and colored the bright light a bloody red. Continue reading “Sanctuary part 2”
Sanctuary
Ethan led his small but growing group of stragglers west along the narrow street. He was still shaken from his encounter with the witch but was feeling better about where he was headed. It seemed everyone still on their feet had the same idea, they were all headed to the church on Hillsborough. The demons, though, these creatures, they seemed to have had the same idea. They were here to kill humans, and so they followed where their pray flocked.
Ethan emerged onto the main road and was assailed by a landscape of carnage fit for Dante.
“Oh my God,” Lilly breathed, “they’re cutting people off.” Continue reading “Sanctuary”
Recipe for Chicken
Ruined Chicken Dinner
What you’ll need:
Expensive chicken
Expensive swanky BBQ sauce
Expensive swanky spice rub
Expensive natural charcoal
Cheap-ass Webber kettle grill
What you should do:
- Start by doing something smart like baking the huge chicken breast in the oven for 30 minutest first
- Use too many coals, pour them into the grill while they’re still too hot
- Put the pre-cooked breast and raw wings on the grill after rubbing with spices and basting with sauce
- Observe fire and smoke that leap from the lava-hot coals, try in vain to move the chicken around as fast as possible while choking on the smoke
- Fail to find cool spots to cook chicken without burning it. Lava is everywhere
- Watch your dinner burn as long as you can stand it, then pull it off the grill as if you’re actually going to eat it
What you get:
Chicken burned to a black crisp on the outside and not really done on the inside.
On the up side the broccoli salad turned out great and you can’t burn booze. Well, I mean, you can but you have to work at it.
Fun with electricity – an embarrassingly true story
So, this morning, after some poor life choices involving a very heavy roll of wire fencing, I decided to put up a hot wire to keep the dog in the back yard (and thus prevent her from eating the chickens). Several stores later, I had a roll of wire, some insulater clippy things, and an ADU (Automatic Devil Unit) that would electrify about 10 miles of hot wire. I brought it back to the house and, in pouring rain, started installing the clips. I strung the wire, ran some Romex from the ADU to the fence – which I cut too long – ran some more from the ADU to the grounding rod – which I cut too short – and wired it all together. Then I took it apart and wired it up the right way and plugged it in. The light blinked as lights do, but there was no popping noise, I think I need to drive the ground in deeper, for which I’ll need a much heavier hammer than I have. Still, I thought, it’s probably ok. Continue reading “Fun with electricity – an embarrassingly true story”
Bad things coming
The strangling order of humanity was slipping, he could feel it. It was glorious! He explored the darkness before him, seeing portents, feeling possibilities swim through his fingers, tasted dark wishes that no one but he could perceive within the whispering black. It all hinted at a dark dawn he and his kind had waited on for ages. So many years! The thought came on suddenly, heated dull red and hissing with anger. But now…Carrion, the name he’d always associated with himself, slid one hand through the emptiness before him, planing through it like water and trailing luminescence behind. Could there be…? He clamped down on this new thought, this precious possibility, too precious even to think, much less speak aloud. But, still, just, it was so…delicious.
“Is there enough? Enough slack in the noose for one quick gasp?” Carrion breathed, quietly, reverently, is there? His lids slid down slowly over ember-like eyes, he reached again into the dark – and felt it, like a cool breeze to one trapped in a cave. It was there, the chance, the path to open skies and limitless possibility.
“Yes!” Carrion’s laughter started low and dark as the hole he languished in, but it built and rose, a drowning man thrashing to the surface. The laughter built and rose and burst forth into the world above as thunder from a clear night sky.
Buy a boat, they said
We went to breakfast and I accidentally dropped the creamer thingy in my coffee – it promptly sinks to the bottom of my cup. They call that foreshadowing. Continue reading “Buy a boat, they said”
Air moving
Breathe
The silver skin of still water breaks into midnight black ripples, stirred by a faint breeze.
Breathe
The contorted edges of dry leaves lift and catch in the growing wind, skirling in brittle drifts.
Breathe
Bare branches sway and clatter like a battleground of wooden swords and old bones. Groaning trunks join in, bent by the mass of unseasonably warm air driving over the land. Like the breath of some Titan, the night air feels alive with vast motion. An unfathomanble continent sliding over cities, through dry winter grass, moaning dark harmonics. Ethan Starke stands at the end of his driveway trying to imagine the sheer enormity of the ocean of air moving over him. He blinks the though away, mind retreating to a more comfortable context. Like the earth breathing, he thinks, beginning his late night stroll with a silent step left onto the sidewalk. The air continues to move, from west to east, pulling with it leaves and bits of debris beyond counting. Silt caught in a swift current of air. Step into that current and you are surrounded, particles swirling in eddies around you. Ethan walks through that river of air, and like silt in a swift current, countless unseen motes swirl around him.
And some of them stick.
Lost Journal Page
Day _____, (___)
The sea has come for me.
I should have seen the signs, but I was too delirious from lack of sleep and battling the demon birds. Now I’ve fled the ship, and with it the screeching and clawing and nightmares, and sailed into the maelstrom on the dinghy. I can’t tell spindrift from the horizontal rain, both are driven by gale winds directly into my eyes, forcing them closed to a tight squint. It’s a mercy really, there’s nothing to see but blue gray eternity all around. I know there are rocks, and the eight foot swells would delight in dashing me upon them, but I can’t see them. The sails have blessedly ripped free, slowing my breakneck pace somewhat.
We think we can tame the sea. We think we can sail upon her in sunlit, carefree arrogance. She is not to be so trifled with, and this is my reminder that I am but an insect. Probably my last reminder.
It’s worth it to escape the birds.
Something’s in the backyard
Ethan let his fork clink onto the empty plate before him and drained his wineglass, then settled back into his couch. “Not bad,” he said aloud, and the dog isn’t even begging – yet. Spurred by that thought he swept up the empty glass and half-empty bottle of red in one hand, clamped the plate and fork with the other and tried to pluck it all from his coffee table without scratching the wood. He’d almost taken one whole step toward the kitchen before a loud bark erupted from the back of the house. Continue reading “Something’s in the backyard”