mariness

My latest little flash fairy tale, Mercy, just popped up at Daily Science Fiction.

Enjoy!

New little story from me up at Daily Science Fiction today, Memories of Monsters. Enjoy!

Today is, by decree fee, the day of the watermaidens – and this year, the watermaidens intend to invite a unicorn or two to their celebrations.

Such invitations are rare events – sometimes happening only once a century, if then.  It is not that the watermaidens dislike unicorns, precisely – indeed, some have even opened their springs and ponds and lakes to the delicate yet wild creatures from time to time, when the unicorns need to refresh themselves in cold water.  A few watermaidens have even entered into long friendships with unicorns, guarding the creatures with their magics, or beckoning young people to come closer, and place their chests against a unicorn's horn.

But watermaidens, like unicorns, tend to be solitary creatures, and when not solitary, tend to enjoy certain activities not entirely approved of by the more proper unicorns. Not that all unicorns demand chastity – far from it – but many of the older and more traditional unicorns do feel that it is their duty to uphold the standards associated with them. And although few watermaidens continue to practice their ancient art of dragging mortals down into the water depths – in part because many of them have no depths to drag mortals into – the very existence of that tradition causes even the most frivolous, unconventional unicorns to shudder. Nor do watermaidens, for the most part, care to venture into the deepest parts of the forests and meadows where unicorns hide or dance – they are not comfortable leaving their waters for long.

(Indeed, even on this day, many watermaidens will remain under their frozen lakes, or hide in seafoam - they prefer their comforts, those watermaidens.)

This, of course, makes it rather hard to invite the unicorns to their celebrations.  Without knowing precisely where the unicorns live – and with no safe way to travel there – messages must be sent instead. And the watermaidens, of course, have never been overly fond of paper and pen – paper tends to disintegrate, if in their hands for too long. A few of them do have cell phones – but those phones rarely survive long in their watery grasps. Most birds cannot be trusted to send messages.

Still.

The watermaidens have their ways of leaving messages on starlight and the wind, on moonlight and clouds.

And they know how to sing to the unicorns.

So as you travel today, keep an eye out. That white flash – that gleam of light – it might be nothing more than a reflection of sunlight, or some creation of mortals, or an optical illusion.

Or it might just be a watermaiden dancing with a unicorn.

Time for the obligatory year end round up of Various Things I Published/Was Involved in During 2017, a year where we learned that if you don't write all that much in 2016, you won't publish all that much in 2017.

I know. Who would have thunk?

But it wasn't a completely empty year either, including, as it did:

Novella:

Probably the publication I was proudest of this year, an epic, novella length poem (yes, about 28,000 words), Through Immortal Shadows Singing, published by Papaveria Press.

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and multiple other outlets. The SFPA reviewed it here, and Goodreads readers chimed in here.

Short story:

You Will Never Know What Opens, in Lightspeed Magazine, December 2017. Hasn't been out long enough to garner that many responses, but Charles Payseur was kind enough to give a thoughtful review here.

Flash fiction:

Six flash fiction pieces, most, but not all, in Daily Science Fiction.

The Lion, in Daily Science Fiction, March 2017. A little fairy tale.

We Need to Talk About the Unicorn in Your Back Yard, Daily Science Fiction, April 2017. Almost certainly the hands down most popular short fiction piece from me this year. If you missed it, it's a short read. I promise.

The Witch in the Tower, Fireside, July 2017. A little fairy tale, one of my personal favorites of the year.

Stealing Tales, Daily Science Fiction, November 2017. Another little fairy tale.

"Gingerbread Smoke," in Typhon: A Monster Anthology Vol 2., by Pantheon Magazine. This was probably the hands down hardest piece of mine to find this year, bar none, but I promise: the anthology really truly is available through Amazon now, and is forthcoming from other outlets shortly.

Pipers Piping, Daily Science Fiction, December 2017. A little Christmas story.

Poetry:

The Study in Mithila Review: The Journal of International Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Stained Oak Leaves, in Umbel & Panicle.

Euryale at the Shore, in Polu Texni

Hunter, in Mythic Delirium.

Burning, in Wild Musette. (This one is literary/non-speculative.)

Related Work:

On Fairy Tales: A weekly essay series on Tor.com discussing fairy tales and various fairy tale inspired works.

The Pixar Rewatch. A sequel to the 2015-2016 Disney Read-watch, this monthly essay series explored the Pixar movies – discussing development and financial details, animation, other tidbits and of course, the films themselves.

The Secret of NIMH Another add-on to the Disney Read-watch, this essay appeared over at Uncanny, and focused on Don Bluth and his first animated picture.

And speaking of the Disney Read-watch, the very last post in that series – a wrap-up post – appeared in January 2017, making the entire series – technically – still eligible for the Best Related Work category.

Dramatic Presentation (short)

Deathlight, which originally appeared in Lightspeed back in 2016, was turned into an audio play this year by Fancy Pants Gangsters.

Onwards to 2018!

Technically, this is the second day of Christmas, making this little story still relevant: Pipers Piping, about getting a little too much into a certain holiday song.

Enjoy!

A new short story from me today, The Witch in the Tower, up at Fireside Fiction.

Enjoy!

Up at Daily Science Fiction this morning, a little thing about a unicorn and a homeowner's association. Enjoy!

Also, if for some reason you missed my story, Deathlight, in last year's Lightspeed, it's been turned into an audio play by the folks at Fancy Pants Gangsters. They have a number of other short plays up at their site as well - check them out!

The Huntsmen was one of those stories that I wrote because the general concept wouldn't stop nagging at me: how did the princess of the original tale, collected by the Grimm brothers back in the early 19th century, manage to find eleven women who looked just like her? (It was only after I finished the story that I remembered that the majority of people at the time had no access to corrective lenses, so many people would have been too nearsighted to tell the difference.) And why go to so much effort just to get an unfaithful lover back?

I was so focused on those questions that I more or less ignored the other oddity of the tale - the sudden, never explained entrance of a talking lion. But as I shuffled the lion to the side, he started nagging at me too.

This is the result.

It's an example of how very often, when writing one story, another one appears. At least in my case.

The inaugural issue of Umbel & Panicle is out, and with it, my poem "The Stained Oak Leaves."

Enjoy!

My family found my first cat through a want ad, when we were looking for a cat who could help with the mouse problem. That cat was more than successful, and always superior to the family she graciously agreed to share living space with. My second cat was a rescue from the streets of Miami; I'd hit the point where I wanted the cat, and I'd asked friends to keep an ear out for any cats in need of a home, and there was Tasha in all of her not-exactly-friendly neuroticism, convinced, post joining me, that I was the only worthwhile human being on earth. The Grey One was another kitten found by friends, that I got after Tasha died, leaving the Little One distraught.

The Little One was different.

He found me.

He was a tiny ball of mud that barely looked like a kitten when he found me. I washed him and considered what to do with him - I already had Tasha who did not regard other living creatures with favor and certainly was not interested in sharing her human with another cat. And yet. He was so incredibly adorable and loud and adorable - and he'd followed ME. He'd picked me. I decided that I couldn't give him up.

Even if it meant no peace in the household for a couple of years.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

I gave him a nicely evil name, Asmodean, since he'd wormed his way into the household, and an internet pseudonym, the Little One, since he was a very small kitten. Right from the beginning, he was more of a dog than a cat - he followed me around like a puppy, played fetch, and was incredibly friendly - some critics said overly friendly - to anyone who entered. He had an underappreciated habit of just sitting on people when not headbutting them.

He also loved to play, and jump, and leap - I've never seen another cat make some of the jumps that he did, which had the tendency to startle visitors and board games. And one - only one - bad habit; he was convinced, despite all protests to the contrary, that computer and laptop keyboards were designed to be cat beds. As I explained once, years back, one of my pet peeves as a writer was how much time I had to spend removing him from the keyboard. He added a good ten pages of random letters and symbols to my Tor.com post on Toy Story just last week.

His first bad moment came when Tasha died. She may have hated him, but he loved her, and also, I realized, he'd never been alone. He did not like being alone at all. So I acquired the Grey One and told him that she was his kitten. They took me literally; I've sometimes been allowed to pet the Grey One, but she was always his cat, not mine.

When I got sick, he was the best thing ever.

He knew something was wrong when I first moved up here, and got quiet and even friendlier, if possible - I think he was afraid that I would leave him behind. Despite his usual vocal objections to car rides, he was completely silent on the way up. The moment we let him out of his carrier, he went for me, and stayed beside me. He didn't quite have the Grey One's unusual gift for knowing exactly when my blood pressure dropped, but he did know that he could get on top of me, and I could scratch his chin, and that was important knowledge. He rarely left me alone for an instant, and I needed that.

I was up in Columbus when we moved to this house According to my brother, he freaked out and headed straight for a cabinet as everything was moved out of the apartment. He was the last thing to leave, primarily because he didn't want to leave the cabinet - I think because he was afraid he would never see me again. When I came to the house a few days later, he went NUTS and clung to me for the next several days.

And that was our interaction for the next several years. He slept with me, watched TV with me, leaned against me or slept on me or slept near me when I wrote or read, listened to every telephone conversation. He sat at the window, watching me leave on the trike or in someone else's car, waiting for me to return.

He did start to slow down, just a little. He stopped leaping to the top of the bookshelves - something he used to be able to do from the floor, and could still do from the TV stand, and did a few times after we arrived here. As he started having a few problems jumping to the my bed, which is a bit high - he could make it, but he kinda had to claw the arrival - I got him a set of little kitty stairs, which he liked. He could still jump on the couch, and did that without a problem. In the past year or so, he tended to stay on my bed a little bit more. But every time I thought, ok, he's slowing down, he'd surprise me by jumping to the window, or dashing through the hallway, or indulging in his loud, raspy, purrs. When he made it to the age of 17 this fall, I thought that I was going to be lucky enough to have him for a few more years.

Yesterday morning, he was at the windowsill, watching the cardinals. Late yesterday afternoon, his back legs visibly gave out. He struggled for a bit. An hour or so later, he was back to walking, and paced the hallway, but he seemed a bit confused and disoriented. He stared at the litter box for a bit, and then - very unusually - refused it (though he used the easily cleaned tile floor.) Then he seemed better and came back to the bedroom. I brought him some tuna fish, and it took him a moment to realize what it was, and eat it. He wandered a bit more, but kept stopping and staring at corners, or looking confused.

I probably should have taken him to the vet right then, but....I don't drive, and we don't have a 24 hour vet that I can reach via mobility scooter or trike. He seemed to recover a bit in the evening; I had him on my lap as we watched Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. But he was also incredibly quiet. Much later, I found him in between the TV stand and the wall, head on the speaker, the other cat watching him. I picked him up and he flopped against my chest immediately.

I don't think either one of us slept well - I know I didn't. At about 4 am, he started seizing. He got better after I held him again. I managed a bit more sleep. By the time I woke, he was seizing again.

He was in bad shape when we reached the vet.

We didn't even have time to put him to sleep. He died while I was slowly rocking him, wrapped in a towel, back and forth, wrapped in a towel. I'm not sure he even knew I was there, but I hope he did.

He was the hands down best cat I've ever had, more than a cat, a friend.

The Grey One is sleeping curled up in the sun, nearby. She's been watching me off and on since I got back. I think she thinks I can still bring him home.

I want to fill this with funny memories, but my heart is too full right now.

Bye, little cat. You will be so, so missed.