Sometimes I write here

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.

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.

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”

“The news said she didn’t make it, I’m sorry,” Lilly said, a hint of the old concern in her voice.

Today was Saturday, and Friday’s warm humidity had collided with the normal October coolness and produced a satisfyingly dense fog. I’d been perfectly content watching reruns of Castle from the familiar safety of my couch, but the phone had rung, and I, unwisely, had answered.

“You have some damned explaining to do,” said my phone. I knew the voice, the tone. I knew I was in for it. But instead,

“Oh? About…?”
“What are you doing right now?” she challenged.
“Watching Castle,”
“Snarky or serious?”
“Snarky one,”

Lilly paused, as if contemplating the relative worth of Castle versus whatever she wanted.

Is this what a panic attack feels like? the thought flickered through Ethan’s mind and was lost, one clear glimpse of a single piece of straw – in a hurricane. His mind was a strange and stormy place, ears full of booming blood and throbbing pressure. He could feel his heart hammering in his neck and constricting ice in his core. Sounds came to him twisted and diminished, the screams from patrons two tables over seemed to come from far away, traffic noise from beyond the patio was lost to him altogether.