“See these yellow marks?”
They nod. “What do they mean?”
“They mean I’ve been chosen for a special job, and I have special power that goes with that.”
She wrinkles her nose, but his eyes light up. “Like magic?”
“Kind of like magic... I’m going to live five hundred years.”
“But not with us,” I hear her whisper, but he isn’t listening.
“Are you going to be invincible?” He sounds so excited.
It’s hard to speak around the lump in my throat. I grab both of them and snuggle them tight against my chest.
“Yeah, little brother. I’ll be invincible.”
--
I'm going to make myself cry. Aw. Awwww. This Air elemental (yellow = air) has twin siblings, probably about six or seven years old, and they really have no idea what's going on.
The concept that the elementals are picked up out of their regular lives and shoved into this is a really interesting one. Although not a fun one to break to your family, I can imagine.
Is this what drowning feels like?
Or maybe it’s the reverse of drowning. My lungs won’t fill with anything, not air not water not anything I CAN’T BREATHE.
How can she do it? How does she breathe way up here where the earth has only the loosest hold on her? I’m going to fly out into empty space if emptier space than this actually exists and I’m going to reverse-drown in the nothingness I CAN’T BREATHE.
I’ve never understood why anyone could be afraid of water, they all love air so much and now I know why.
I CAN’T BREATHE.
--
The all-caps is on purpose, as is the lack of punctuation. I asked a friend which elemental to use, intending to, uh, drown them. She gave me Air, and suddenly instead of being about Air drowning, it became about Water suffocating. That was super cool.
The silver against his dark skin was startling and out of place. Earth usually wore gold and it was jarring to her to see the silver ring on his little finger. He saw her staring and held out his left hand. She took it and inspected the band, nothing more than a silver wire with the ends twisted into overlapping spirals.
“What is it?” she asked timidly.
“It was at one time an engagement ring,” he answered. “Now, it’s just a ring.”
Long after he had left her village, she remembered him, and his spiral ring, and his sad eyes.
--
I used to wear a spiral ring like this, which is where the prompt sparked.
This Earth is a young man who also happens to be black, so that was fun. I also discovered that all the elementals of one element share a soul, which is why "Earth usually wore gold".
I love these guys.
I hate cities in the rain.
Never mind the cement, concrete, iron, and steel that reject the cleansing, healing shower. Never mind the pipes and gutters that shuffle away the floods.
I hate umbrellas.
Everywhere I look, people scurry to work, to play, to home, hiding under compact shelters to escape my embrace. Skirting puddles as if they were lakes. Avoiding me as though I would bite.
Only the children appreciate the storm. They duck impatiently out from under their mothers’ umbrellas, turn up their faces to the rain, and splash through the puddles.
I love children in the rain.
--
Another one I did in a notebook in church. This one because a friend wanted to know what we could come up with for Umbrella.
It was supposed to be an elemental, but then it turned out to be from the perspective of a storm. So that was interesting.
Someone was climbing up to join me on the roof. I sighed and turned around.
“What are you doing up here? Why’d you leave the party?”
“Because I was lonely.”
“All the people are inside, dork. You’d only be lonely out here!”
A breeze wrapped around my shoulders, whispering amusedly in my ear. I smiled.
“The air inside is hot and dead. Out here it’s alive and breathing. Out here, I can breathe.”
I suggested to the breeze that it whisper to the invader, and felt it leave my skin.
He backed away. “Okay, you’re a nut. I’m outta here.”
--
Drabbling in a notebook is tough because you have to count the words and rearranging is a pain. And I even misremembered the prompt, which was actually "Just Because I Was Lonely". But whatever.
I sorta like this one, although the conversation is terrible and the end is too abrupt.
Yes, I broke every rule in the book.
No, I wasn’t being rebellious.
Reckless,
stupid,
head-over-heels in love,
but not rebellious.
Yes, I sneaked out of the house
to fly with her in the dead of night
when all the good angels were asleep.
No, I wasn’t doing it to prove anything.
I just wanted to fly with my girlfriend.
Yes, I went against everything you ever taught me
and made my vows with the wrong person.
A rebel,
a demon,
a woman.
No, I’m never backing down.
I’m not a rebel.
I’m being honest.
I love her.
The end.
--
So Aster wrote a poem.
I wasn't aware it was going to be a poem until she split the third sentence over four lines, and then suddenly it was a poem.
The yes/no thing makes me giggle. And I love that the rebel/demon/woman thing is progressing through "worse" attributes.
“There’s not enough time.”
“There will never be enough time. That’s why we took the job, isn’t it? Because no one will ever have enough time.”
“No, really, listen to me. This time, it’s real. This time, we’re out of time. This time, we aren’t going to make it out.”
“We were never going to make it out, sweetheart.”
“Stop it! Stop it; it’s not as simple as that! We are going to die down here. It’s not the time to be philosophical about it.”
“Sweetheart, this is what we wanted.”
“...Not this time. I didn’t want it this time.”
--
A one-off where I have absolutely no fricken clue what's going on. Honestly, no idea. I just started typing and it grew into this thing.
In other news, the prompt itself is 10% of my wordcount. I think that's a record.
Before Serenity, if you’d asked me what my favorite time of day was, I would have said mornings. Sun streaming in through the curtains, breeze rustling the trees, the promise of a fresh start.
Now, if you ask me the same question, I say dusk. The soft blurred colors of twilight, the sleepy chirps of nesting birds and stretching crickets. But the magic is in stars blinking their eyes open and murmuring lazy good evenings to each other and to Serenity, who whispers their names and their stories in my ear. Dusk is breathless, beautiful, magical, familiar. Dusk is home.
--
This is Amber. I would never say morning was my favorite time of day.
I don't know if she's in love with him or with the stars. Could be either, could be both.
I'm not the only one who did a star-person drabble for this prompt!
She expected Air to make a move, but she didn’t expect them to gang up on her. Fire grabbed her around the waist and pinned one arm behind her back. Water sat on her ankles so she couldn’t kick them away. Air snatched her wrist and yanked up the sleeve before she could wrench away. She heard Fire suck in a breath at her ear, seeing the neat rows of parallel lines crawling their way up her arms like zebra stripes. Air traced a finger over the scars. She flinched.
“Why?” Air whispered.
“To make maple syrup,” she answered bitterly.
--
Mash-up of elementals plus an actual experience with a zebra-striped person.
I enjoy that Earth is never named even though it's in third person limited. And her dark joke at the end made me smile.
