“Charming” is supposed to be this abstract concept of politeness and decency, holding doors and offering seats and a good smile.  It’s a TV gimmick that makes you fall in love with the hero and grudgingly respect a villain every once in a while.

But I swear that in his case “charming” must be an actual object, a piece of witchcraft hidden behind his scrappy, flighty, fierce exterior.  There has to be something behind this hopeless entanglement, some... spell no one can see or feel or make any sense of.

Because he can only charm me.  And I’m charmed hard.

Funny how any old thing can become a symbol.  

One well-placed analogy can turn a plum into a representation of how a relationship works.  A single random choice turns a string of plastic beads into a stand-in engagement ring.  “Marmalade” becomes the keyword for “I wish you were here”.

With associations like that running around the weirdest things can turn dark, triggers we never see.  A well-loved song is synonymous with death.  A name you can no longer stand to hear.  Plaid shirts suddenly all look bloodstained.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but so is morbidity.

--

Yeah all of the analogy examples in the second paragraph are from my real life.

Two of the ones from the third are from an alternate reality of my real life.  The name one is from my real life, although it's gotten better.

Symbolism features heavily in my world.

Sometimes I look at her, and I’m jealous.  Because she doesn’t remember.  

All that time I was wrapping my arms around myself I thought I was trying to hold her.  Maybe I was trying to hold onto what we were.

I’m jealous of her because she’ll never be haunted by what happened to her.  What happened to all of us.  She can’t remember it.

But she’ll never remember him, either.  As many stories as I tell her, they’ll still only be stories to her.

Such an important part of our lives, and she’ll have no memory of him at all. 

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. 

“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.

The laws of astronomy are essentially ruining my life.

Her escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, so I’m stuck in permanent orbit around her.  Such an eccentric, irregular orbit.  I drift around peacefully most of the time until I’m close to her and then I zip past into cold empty oblivion again.  Until the next time.

I can crunch the numbers, calculate the forces involved.  I know precisely what’s happening, but I’m just an asteroid caught in her gravity field.  I can’t control my own motion.

And someday my irregular orbit will fail me, and she’ll burn me alive.

She liked beginnings best.  She designed, you know, colors and patterns just falling into place under her guidance.  She liked beginning things, chattering about how they’d come together in the end.

In the end.  That’s where I came in.  She didn’t like those, endings.  So she’d always pass them to me, abandon them to my hands.  I did my best to live up to her vision.

She did have to do her own ending, once.  And since then... there are no more beginnings.

And without beginnings, there’s nothing more for me to do.

It’s the end of endings for me.

--

I'm pretty sure this one-off is basically incoherent to anyone but me and knitters.

The story is basically about a boy who finishes knitting what his girl designs, because he likes the mindless work and the end product, and she likes the process of creation and the magic of something new.  You can figure out the rest from there, I think.  Again, I played with the meaning of Endings and gave it two different senses that have to be deciphered from context.

But really, it's about something deeper than that.  It's about relationships, about how people balance each other out by playing to their strengths and minimizing weaknesses through collaboration.  It's about creative power, how some people are visionaries and others are happy to work their magic for them.  It's about death, and the hole that's left in someone's absence.

The firelight glinted off her hair, turning the strands into red gold.  
“Thank you for inviting me.  You have such a wonderful family.”
“We have a wonderful family.  On several levels.”  He squeezed her gently.
She smiled shyly.  “Can we be a family of two?”
“Call it two and a half.”
“Seven months left.”
“Fine, two and two-ninths.  Math doesn’t matter.”
She laughed.  “No. However many we are, we’re a family.”
“Indeed we are.”  He watched her eyes wander the room.
“Let’s be together like this every year.”
“We will be, angel,” he promised.
And the fire flickered in agreement.

--

Again, sort of a conglomeration of a bunch of topics that had been on my mind: a Christmas party with my partner's family, teenage pregnancy, belonging, a conversation no one else should really hear.

"Angel" is my partner's nickname for me, and it felt like it belonged there.  Although in no way does this reflect on my real life!

She reminded us of a mother bear.  Standing over those two little kids, almost daring us to come and take them from her.  We would do it, all right.

The arrows flying at us started to come with their tips already stained with blood.  We couldn’t figure it out until we finally stood over the body.  The shots had never stopped coming, but her quiver lay empty on her back.

She’d shot at us with our own arrows, pulled from her bleeding wounds.  Whatever else you could say about her, you had to admire her tenacity.  She was a fighter.

--

Another one-off.  No idea of the context, the identity or motivation of any of the characters, or the eventual outcome of the situation.  I just like archery, and the story sort of unfolded from there.

Seemed like forever she’d been wearing that thing.  The bracelet that chained her to dreams she no longer believed in and reminded her of a place she no longer inhabited.  Funny to think it had only been a year…

It caught on a corner of the desk the next day and quietly ripped apart, dropping from her wrist.  She looked at it, lying there on the floor, a funny sort of half-hopeful look on her face.  Forever, she’d thought.  Forever and a day, now.

The doorbell rang.  She knew who it was.  Maybe she’d been wrong about wish bracelets.

--

A one-off drabble that basically smushed together a lot of things that were on my mind at the time: wish bracelets, wearing something so long it becomes part of you, forever being not actually very long, someone coming back to you.  I like how it turned out.

I also like the phrase "funny sort of half-hopeful look".

As I passed the mirror I glimpsed my reflection.  I bit my lip hard and looked away, but I had it memorized already.

Hair, dyed brown and cut off above my shoulders.  Shirt, teal-and-black-plaid button-down.  I didn’t look like I used to, now.  Much as I fought and resisted and cried, I was slowly becoming Her.  

My own reflection was torture, my own voice a sound from the painful past.  Why, out of all the people I could have become, did it have to be Her?

The one who coddled me, and then threw me out like so much garbage.

--

I remember asking a friend for a prompt and how the entire group of drabblers groaned when he gave us a color.  We hate color prompts.

You'll notice that the color is actually totally irrelevant to this drabble.  I could have picked any color.  In fact, when I envision this happening, the shirt in question is actually pink.

But I like the emotion in it.  Frustrated, ashamed, but at some level okay or even proud of what she is.

Rings of time.  Circles inside circles inside circles.  One after another.  That is my life.  Each year, as I come full circle to my birth, I add one.  I’ve been around for many circles.  I stretch up and reach the wind.  I stretch down and reach the water.  I am always here, always steady, always sure.

But now those who move come, and they kill me.  They pull me down from the wind and up from the water, and take me from my place.  And now I am square, with sharp corners and edges.  Hollow.  No longer circles upon circles.

--

This one is a bit of a riddle.  Obviously the speaker is not human.  So tell me, what is the speaker in this piece?  What happened to him?

Spin… and drop… and feed.  Press fingers tight to the place where rolag meets thread.  Spin, and feed.  Ignore the glint of gold collecting on the shaft.

Spin, and feed.  That is all.  Don’t pay attention to anything else.  Spin, and feed.

Now stop.  Find a bobbin and wind it all up.  Careful, don’t let it unravel.   And again, spin… and drop… and feed.

And don’t look.  Don’t think.  Just spin.  Stay with it.  Spin, and feed.

Rolag’s gone.  Find another. Overlap the ends and keep going.  Spin, and feed.  That is all there is.  Spin.  Spin. Spin.

Gold thread.

--

I've always been fascinated by spinning, ever since I was a kid.  The information I used to write this drabble was drawn mostly from the Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce, the only real source of spinning knowledge I had.  It's also, of course, based on Rumplestiltskin, since I was on a fairytale kick at the time.

I found out later people do still spin, and learned in a hurry to do so myself.  With the knowledge I have now, it's astonishing how accurate that picture is.


Settle an argument for me.  Does the rhythm and repetition make this one a peaceful, soothing drabble, as I think?  Or is it creepy and frightening, as my best friend says?

I start swearing in German and laughing at the same time as I lift my hands.  I look like I murdered an alien barehanded. 

“Josué…” I grumble, “This is the fifth batch you’ve ruined in two weeks. Give me a break already.”

Josué grins at me, the telltale blue smudges of ink on his fingertips giving him away. “You always mix the blood with your hands. I can’t resist!”

I try to scowl as the thick purple liquid oozes off my hands, but I’m laughing too hard. Instead, I slap him with dripping hands. At least now he’s stained too.

--

My first ever drabble, and it had to be a color.  You're kidding.  Color prompts are difficult because it doesn't give you much to work with.  On the other hand, they tend to be the most free to interpretation.

This idea was definitely stolen from myself.  In the original concept, the offending blue stuff was squashed blueberries instead of ink.  And the character's name was Raviv, not Josué.  I did have a character named Josué, but he was from something else entirely.

Oh, and it's not clear out of context, but that's stage blood.  Slightly less creepy than you might otherwise think.