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Hi! I was wondering if you knew anything about the longer version of the scorpion/turtle/frog story? I swore I read a version of the story where the scorpion and frog met each other in different lives and eventually had a happy ending. I'm not sure if you wrote it or someone else? Thank you tho!
If I had a nickel for every time I wrote a story about the relationship between two characters where one of them dies at the end, and then someone else wrote an addendum where no, actually, they're both alive and are going to be together forever, etc, etc.
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When her mother asked her how come she was still single, she could feel the mountain looking over her shoulder. It did that a lot, the mountain. Overlooked things. It followed her everywhere, like the moon.
The only place in town where she wouldn't have to see it looming over her all the damn time would have been on top of the mountain itself. Driving to work: mountain. Yoga class. Mountain. Taking Benjy to the vet once he started losing control of his bladder and pissing everywhere in the apartment. Mountain. Stepping outside for a smoke. Mountain. Picking up a bag of frozen vegetables to stir into the pasta. Mountain. Scrolling through instagram at night when she should have probably been shutting off the screens and settling down for bed: you guessed it, peering in through the window. Mountain again.
Brunch with her mother. Mountain. When she finally agreed to let her mother set her up with the son of a friend, and he spent a significant part of their first date talking about microdosing DMT while she picked at her shrimp scampi, the mountain was at the restaurant with them. It accompanied her on the walk home.
She could feel the mountain weighing down on her like some unbearable loneliness, like someone she loved was buried beneath it. But the mountain was ancient, a couple of million years, give or take, and so that would have to have been in a past life. Sometime in the Pliocene, probably, or maybe the early Pleistocene. Dramatic times. Ice caps forming, sinking sea levels, forests giving way to savanna. So unlike the tepid rains and mild winters she was used to. Early Australopithecus, bipedal, tool-using, stone-using. He would have chipped away at a stone, incrementally, over hours, days, and then stood on two feet and handed it to her. A piece of rock shaped like a heart.
She felt a pang in her chest imagining it. Dating seemed so much easier back in the old days. No dating apps, swipe left swipe right, a glut of humanity flooding in through the socials, showing her everything she was missing out on, everything that could have been. She wanted to start walking mountainward until the damn thing got so close that she'd lose sight of it, feel the ground slope beneath her feet, keep climbing. Go on all fours, and then vertical again, hand foot hand, ascending. Reach the summit and then start digging. One rock at the time, letting the dirt shift through her fingers and fall, nothing but her, and him, and the mountain. A million years. Another million, unearthing his body, the heart-shaped rock laid to rest beside him, curled up beneath the mountain. Climbing into his arms ever so gently, being careful not to disturb the dust. The two of them cradling each other, through the epochs and the dark.
Deep Water Prompt #3146
The mountain haunts me, someone I loved several lives ago buried deep beneath it. But my current existence is so peaceful. Why should I ever go looking for him?
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Here is the hierarchy of the castle: at the bottom the scullery maids and laundresses and undercooks and so forth; and then the pages, brats of noble blood on unpaid internships, for the experience. Above them the squires, and then the knights, each position a stepping stone to the next - aside from the one lowborn squire carted here from the countryside reeking of cowpies. Everyone hates him. His nose is full of snot; he misses his parents. Never polished armor before, can't play chess or carry a tune, doesn't know how to groom a horse beyond knocking some of the caked mud off their legs and a quick brush-down. His knight cuffs his ears and bemoans that of all the squires he gets the lowborn, makes him do each chore half a dozen times til he gets it right.
And then overseeing the stables is the marshal, and then the seneschal, the lords, the queen, the king; and above them all the princess, who being departed from this world rules us all with unearthly insight. If she would have her will be known she speaks through the tongue and lips of the lowborn who, lifted from the squalor, represents the muck and dirt and filth our princess - God guard her soul! - lies buried in.
He is slightly built, the squire, in the bloom of youth, his face smooth like a woman's, beard not yet grown in; and to see the princess wrest his eyes up in his skull, beneath his soiled face all the lightness and delicacy and grace of the princess animating his muscles, her voice issuing from his throat, it is to see him transformed. It is for this reason it could not be a noble's child in this role, nor a girl, for our princess is the spirit and soul of the land itself, the rocks and dirt, the crude boy-child with the root between his legs, and in him she is realized, not as divinity nor as paragon but as regent. Through his body she enacts laws, sets tariffs, threatens wars, orders executions. May her reign last eternal, amen.
In his downtime, the squire is beaten by his knight, develops some measure of competency in armor maintenance, grows a set of new and different callouses. His voice breaks and resettles. His beard finally comes in. In time, he will join the ranks of knights himself. His princess no longer speaks through him; she has long since found another. You may see him riding abroad, an odd tincture to his mien unlike the other knights. Some of the countryside left in him. How he lopes his steed along the patchy dirt roads. How he knocks the dirt from his boots. How, having accepted your humble invitation, he lets one shoulder slump lower than the other as he sits back at the table.
You, a mere peon born and raised outside of the castle, know none of this. You simply find his manner frank, and seek to curry favor with a knight. Perhaps he will settle that dispute about the wild hogs in your favor, or be lenient when taxes come due. You listen to him talk about his lady love, the princess, his lifelong quest for her favor which is in its way a courtship. And although you have not heard a thing about the princess in many, many years, to hear him talk you can almost see her watching over you from the highest tower of the castle, her golden hair catching the wind so that it does your soul good to picture it, a vision of majesty in this dreary world.
Deep Water Prompt #3140
No one outside the castle walls knows how long the princess has been dead. In order to continue ruling, her soul possesses me, a low born squire hired for this exact purpose.
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The great tragedy of La Belladonna, Luciano used to say (Luciano was in the habit of calling even minor imperfections tragedies, detracting as they did from a divine perfection), was that it was a weapon ill-suited for its form. "Imagine, that slip of a girl wielding it in a swordfight," he would pontificate, once his guests had retired to the parlor for postprandial refreshment. "It is a romantic notion, granted, to imagine her bloodied, outmatched, barely able to keep fighting, as I stand above her brandishing my sword, triumphant. And yet! Unbeknownst to me - the thin line of blood beading across my cheek. A dark smile grows on her face. Ah! The fatal wound."
Here, he would accept consolations for his imminent demise, lips pursed in mock solemnity, before continuing: "Alas, these mythical glancing blows - a nick here, a scrape there - are these wounds befitting of a sword? La Belladonna is a hermaphrodite of sorts, a woman's curse on a man's weapon. A discreet cut, a nick, all duplicitousness and subterfuge, to insinuate the death unobtrusively. This, on an obtrusive three-foot blade whose stroke would be more than lethal enough in itself!
"If she had brains," he would continue, "she'd shatter that sword into fragments and instead make of it a dart, a stiletto, some dainty little implement scarcely larger than a nail file. Imagine her brushing past me on the street, bundled up incognito, scraping me so lightly across the back of the hand that I fail to notice. The wound, insignificant as it is, has been planted. You have doubtless heard the stories of the Marquis de Carre, its previous owner, that idiot fop who while examining his new purchase nicked his thumb on the blade. The scratch did not heal. It simply grew, winding its way across his hand and up his arm, as shallow as ever, even as they swaddled his arm in dressing to try and stanch it." Here Luciano would bare his teeth in the delighted shudder of one enjoying a good ghost story. "They say that by the time infection finally took him, his body was more than forty percent wound."
Here, a shadow would fall over the party, the assembled guests sinking for a moment into unease, before Luciano would banish the gloom with a roar of boisterous laughter. "But quite fortunately for us, the signorina is as stubbornly incongruous as her weapon, and insists on wielding it as a sword, no matter how unbefitting it or she may be for the role. So, I say, bring on La Belladonna!" and here he would raise his glass in toast. "Let her attempt to graze me with her sword while I attempt to run her through with mine. I think, once she is dead, I will display the sword in my study. See which guests succumb to the temptation to examine it, and run their fingers over the blade." Luciano tended to lapse into an unseemly sadism on occasion, a cruelty that had for some reason overshot his would-be assassin and was now an attraction on its own. "La Belladonna must be a seductress, not a fighter. On display, at least, she might have a chance to do her work."
What Luciano failed to realize - what none of us could have known at the time - was that from the moment he had learned of its legend, La Belladonna had already left its mark on him. What must have been a mere pinprick of dissatisfaction at first soon deepened into an obsession. He would trot out his dissertation at every party and social gathering, forever iterating and elaborating upon it. Ceaseless tirades over the incompatible natures of La Belladonna, the soul of a dagger in the body of a sword, and how it should broken down to be one thing or another, et cetera, the wound consuming everything until it was all he could talk about by the end. When the anatomists autopsied Luciano, they found his brain riddled with lesions, each chained to the last as if they had ruptured in sequence.
Of our social circle, I count three among us who have undoubtedly succumbed to the curse of La Belladonna, and at least half a dozen more who are showing symptoms of the disease. As for myself, I consider myself lucky that I never gave much credence to any of Luciano's rantings, and absorbed his grievances only shallowly. The sword of La Belladonna causes me no distress, nor should it, as long as its blade remains far removed from my flesh. And yet in my indifference, I find myself returning to the image of a shallow cut across the ridges of a fingertip, just a pale white line, no deeper, wearing away the furrows and whorls and creases until only a smooth white expanse is left.
Deep Water Prompt #3138
“They call her sword Belladonna.”
“Is it poisonous?” I asked.
“Not in the traditional sense. Cut someone once though, and the cut will spread unstoppable. One nick is death sentence.”
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Slymphs are aquatic parasites commonly found in brackish water, such as estuaries and coastal swampland, though certain species of freshwater slymph may be found inhabiting the shallow regions of lakes and slow-moving streams. They typically range in size from a few inches to roughly a foot long, with the largest specimen on record measuring just over three feet.
Slymphs feed via the suckers on either end of their body, marked by two or three concentric rings of teeth. Once a slymph latches on to a host, it injects a cocktail of neurotransmitters that serves to convince the host's nervous system that the slymph is a perfectly healthy part of their body. The host will subsequently react negatively to any attempt to remove the slymph, with similar intensity to the proposed amputation of an arm or a leg.
If the slymph is killed or otherwise removed, the conviction that it is part of their body will remain, and the host may seek medical attention for the detached slymph, or try to reattach it themselves. This delusion will fade over the next day or so as the slymph's saliva is flushed out of their system.
If, however, the slymph is allowed to remain attached, it will gradually integrate its circulatory system with the host's over the course of several months, its mouthpiece dissolving to meld with the host's flesh. This new appendage seems to have little deleterious effect on the host, other than potentially being cumbersome or unsightly, in addition to the periodic urge to go wading in brackish water in co-incidence with slymph mating season. Those possessing this organ treat it like any other part of their body and attribute to it a panoply of useful functions, such as helping to filter the toxins out of their blood, or making them more sensitive to moisture in the air. So far, any such effects have yet to be empirically proven.
A similar adaptation can be observed in the so-called "emperor slymph", which despite being closely related to the slymph is a different species altogether. The emperor is known by a number of regional names, some of the more colorful ones including: the brackwife, godsflesh, Tom's Lost Scrote, the crown-of-limbs, and twinning folly. The emperor slymph will ambush its prey using its multiple proboscises, which it can fling out like harpoons to inject its prey with a potent dose of neurotransmitters in order to pacify them. Unlike its smaller cousin, the emperor slymph will only feed until satiated, unlatching after it has had its fill of blood.
A person who has served as nourishment for an emperor is under no delusions about its physical characteristics. They will be perfectly capable of recognizing it as a multi-headed beast about the size of a walrus, with snaking necks and sucking toothless mouths designed to seal around a wound, sluggish and territorial, spending hours submerged beneath the water waiting for unsuspecting prey to come wading through its swamp. They will simply be convinced that this bloated creature is somehow a part of their own body, its hungers as natural as their own stomach grumbling at them, and must be provided for and taken care of as such.
Those afflicted by an emperor slymph will return to it for regular feedings. If the emperor has been hunting poorly, and they are its only source of blood, they will take their own anemia as a sign that the equivalent of a blood transfusion is necessary to stay alive. How they go about acquiring someone else for the emperor to feed on will vary greatly from person to person, depending on the severity of their situation and the morality of the person involved.
Multiple cults and communes have grown around the appetites of an emperor slymph, as a surplus of people to feed on means the quantity of blood drawn from each is reduced to a mere tongueful, almost ceremonial. Some adherents of this faith will claim that their mutual feeding has created a bond closer than love or kinship. As their philosophers and theologians propose, not entirely without merit: the slymphs' compatibility with our biology suggests a shared design that runs through our disparate natures, as if all the strange and wondrous creatures of the earth are more fundamentally the same than we realize, each of us an outstretched limb of divinity, flesh of flesh and blood of blood.
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If in danger of being captured, the Cuarrion will take on the appearance of its last victim, assuming it has already consumed enough of their body to facilitate the transformation. It will speak with its victim's tongue, show recognition in their eyes, throw wide their arms in embrace and cry out with all their heart, having been rescued naked and quivering from the beast's den.
Thus discovered, the Cuarrion will allow itself to be led back to civilization to be embraced and wept over and tended to, steadily convalescing, wearing its victim's footsteps to trace out their old habits. As the attentiveness of its companions wanes, the Cuarrion will take the first opportunity to escape back into the wild, taking on its true form again, usually claiming another victim along the way.
If, however, the Cuarrion is kept under constant scrutiny, it will find no opportunity to revert and instead will settle deeper and deeper into its disguise. It no longer needs to hunt: it bears its victim's stomach and intestines and so can subsist happily on their diet. The gestures of familiarity, rather than being second nature to it, will simply become its nature. There are stories of Cuarrion who have lived for decades in the same village, borne children, presided over local festivals, lived to bounce hosts of grandchildren on their knee, been interred in the village cemetery with all the honors befitting an elder of their repute.
There are also stories of Cuarrion who, after decades of peaceful cohabitation, have reverted to their monstrous natures for seemingly no reason at all. When a reason can be located, it is usually some sort of violent shock to the self: a stroke, an assault, an infidelity, the death of a loved one, the uncovering of another Cuarrion.
The ethics of keeping a Cuarrion in captivity are hotly debated. It is difficult to blame the family of a child slain by the Cuarrion, who, having recovered a child in the exact image of theirs, calling out familiar names in a familiar tongue, miraculously alive and whole, will insist on treating it exactly as their child.
Scholars of the Cuarrion's anatomy maintain that even if some vital portion of the victim remains within the beast, it will be inevitably digested over time, as evidenced by the fact that victims who have gone missing weeks prior are found gibbering and semi-feral and must be rehabilitated back into their previous states, if ever; whereas a victim who has gone missing just that day will be found talkative and spry and seemingly unharmed. If the Cuarrion can copy a person identically, the scholars say, it is only through habit and mimicry, blood congealing into the shape of its mold.
If the Cuarrion themselves are asked for input, opinions vary. Most are circumspect. Many prefer not to discuss it at all. The elders among them, who have lived out their lives, tend to speak more freely. "Yes, I consumed the child I was to become who I am, a long time ago, a long time ago," says one, eyes clouded and distant, remembering. "A tragedy, yes. But, eh, so do we all."
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(cw: sexual assault, racism)
truly an incredible sequence of tweets. like stumbling down a flight of stairs only to be hit by a wile e coyote boulder at the end
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someone who can draw do something with this
Normal - Mockatiel
Fire - Fawkatiel
Water - Aquatiel
Electric - Shockatiel
Grass - Stalkatiel
Ice - Blockatiel
Fighting - Jockatiel
Poison - Pockatiel
Ground - Walkatiel
Flying - Flockatiel
Psychic - Socratiel
Bug - Cochaniel
Rock - Rockatiel
Ghost - Chalkatiel
Dragon - Crocatiel
Dark - Apocatiel
Steel - Sprockatiel
Fairy - Frockatiel
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7 free startup ideas worth $1M-$1B
Customizable News Settings - A news website that generates three versions of every news story: a right-wing version, a left-wing version, and a centrist one. You can set your preferences depending on the topic - say you're right-wing on economics, but left-leaning on immigration. Or you can cycle between versions while reading an article to get a comprehensive overview of the issue at hand.
Twitch, but for Uber - With all the drama they have to deal with, independent contractors can gain a second revenue source simply by streaming their jobs. Rather than just offering rides, they can be hired to drive around performing chores and various tasks. The more outrageous the task, the more eyes they're likely to get on their stream. The more popular the stream, the more people calling in who want to be a part of the program.
Panera Lemonade, Your Way - Let the customer take control by deciding how many milligrams of caffeine they can handle. With sufficient warning about the risks, this puts the responsibility back on the consumer, allows you to upcharge for extra caffeine, and creates viral marketing from customers competing to see how high they can go. Variations of this can be created for other menu items, e.g., a version of the One Chip Challenge where the customer decides how much capsaicin to sprinkle on.
Shein, for NFTs - Whenever an NFT project hits the mainstream, there are always going to be people who miss out on being able to purchase one. This creates room in the market for 'knockoffs' - NFTs that mimic the aesthetic of the original, using similar but legally distinct AI art that uses the original set as training data, run on a parallel blockchain. Since the images themselves aren't tied to the blockchain, you can mint the NFTs beforehand and then change the image at the link to whatever happens to be in fashion at the time.
Twitch Chat Plays YouTube - Add a level quality control to AI-generated YouTube videos by allowing users to submit suggestions and vote on the results beforehand. Users can submit Wikipedia articles or movie summaries to be converted to text-to-speech, suggest keywords for the accompanying AI-generated animation, and vote on the best combinations. Users who submit winning suggestions get a portion of the ad revenue.
Buses, but Worse - The current obstacle hindering self-driving car technology is their difficulty adapting to unexpected scenarios. So instead plot a route around the city that minimizes roadway obstacles and heavy traffic, map out that route extensively to provide a model for the autopilot, and you can have a fleet of self-driving cars patrolling that circuit. Passengers can board and get off anywhere along the route.
Twitter, but for Bots - A social media platform populated entirely by bots, all programmed to maximize engagement. Memetic evolution in the wild as the bots latch on to trending keywords, spam each other with AI-generated meme images, mock up t-shirts hawking each other's designs, getting more and more degraded with each sub-iteration. Real people can't make accounts on the platform, but count for views and interactions as they stop to gawk at the virtual ecosystem. Advertisers can pay to have their brands injected directly into the discourse, like throwing a pumpkin into the polar bear cage at the zoo.
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The bog cried for teeth. It pleaded most piteously. One, just one, it burbled and begged whenever Dorte crossed the old wooden bridge, their footsteps echoing down the mossy logs. You don't need them all to chew, you have so many!
"Just ignore it," Dorte's mother told her, "don't look down - Dorte, listen to me! Come along now! Just keep walking." "You must not listen to the bog," her teacher said in class, "for it has nothing wise to say and no good will to grant you." "Boo you nasty dirty thing!" her brother Jesper yelled, and flung rocks into the bog instead, deep gulping upheavals of mud as the bog spluttered and moaned. Dorte felt sorry for the bog, and when she lost her first tooth, hid it away in the back of her drawer, carried it secretly in the palm of her hand. When they next went over the bridge, she swung out her arm and let the tooth drop, like a single flake of sugar.
The bog closed around it without hesitation, water puckering around its edge, sucking it down sweetly. Dorte's mother, striding rapidly as she usually did when crossing the bridge, failed to notice.
Dorte fed the bog all her baby teeth. As she got older she would come to the bridge by herself, crouching down between its railings, looking down at the dark mirror of bog reflecting sky, overgrown with islands of peat and hillocks. She'd give it a gummy smile, tongue still probing the fresh gap in her mouth, and listen to the bog pant and ripple back in anticipation. She'd let her tooth fall to disappear into the murky water, the great dark gaps between the moss, the bog giving a single-toothed grin back.
Dorte grew older. One day she lost the last of her baby teeth, though the significance of it did not strike her till weeks later. Months passed, and the bog began moaning again, pleading ever more piteously than before, swelling up against the mossy logs, confused and whimpering. Dorte held out her empty hands and shook her head desperately, trying to explain to the dumb and senseless bog that she had no more teeth to give it.
"Now look what you've done," said her mother, who in the intervening years had finally noticed what Dorte had been doing. "You've gotten it used to getting teeth, and now it's only going to be disappointed."
The bog even went so far as to follow Dorte home one day, lapping at their doorstep and swamping her mother's garden. It took her father and two neighbors digging a drainage ditch and shoveling in gravel to finally drive the bog back. "I hope you're happy!" said her mother, stomping through her ruined fennel. "It's going to be a nuisance now, begging for teeth from everyone!" Her voice grew foreboding. "They're probably going to have to put it down."
Dorte was horrified. She went pleading with all her friends and classmates for more teeth to feed the bog, but seeing as how they were her age, most of them had freshly run out of baby teeth as well. She was able to scrounge up one or two more, as well as specimens secured from younger siblings, but in the end none of them were as invested in the bog as she was, and it soon became clear that she could only keep this up for another few months, at best. In her most dire moments, Dorte considered flinging herself down, mouth first, upon her bedpost, or else inviting Jesper to fling a rock at her as well, but after much trembling and deliberation, imagining the jagged bloody roots still jutting from her gums, could not bring herself to do the deed.
In the end, the bog shrank back to its original boundaries, becoming quietly desperate again, brackish and dull. Dorte supposed that it, much like her, had become inured to disappointment. She wondered whether it would have been kinder to have never given it that first taste of teeth at all. But as the years passed, even the disillusionment faded. The bog grew thicker, buzzed with darners, broad-antlered moose wading through the waters, dripping sundew from their chins. Dorte grew old and started losing her teeth once more. This time, she no longer thought about feeding them to the bog, except as a fond passing memory of childhood, how foolishly earnest she had been once. Centuries later, farmers digging up peat for fuel would uncover a complete set of small white teeth set into the dark damp moss: a child's smile, arranged like pearls.
Text: The bog is alive, begging for spare teeth each time I cross the old wooden bridge. Everyone tells me to ignore it, but I feel bad, and feed it every baby one I lose.
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A Reveler's Guide to Etiquette
Part 3: Masks
Contrary to mortal masquerades, at fae balls it is the custom to wear one's true face on the surface, while maintaining the facade of one's choice just beneath. Attendees are unmasked twice, thrice, a dozen times a night, either privately or in public, contorting mercurially over the course of the evening or else the same every time, a shifting tapestry of social hierarchies and relationships played out through pantomime and caricature. Like many other fae festivities, the masquerade serves as a burlesque of mortal affairs, those poor wretches who must tramp around with their identities in plain view at all times, concealing all sorts of resentments and insecurities and ambitions underneath.
Given the frequent masking and unmasking, faces interchanged like dance partners, it is also a prime opportunity for the enterprising rapscallion to make away with a fae's true face.
Tyros at the art may opt for a simple snatch and grab, but quickly find that fae, when not ready to be unmasked, tend to keep a hostile demeanor behind their faces. Many an attempted theft has gone awry when the unmasking reveals not an ex-lover or historical visage or the queen defaced with goatee and mustache, but instead the face of a rabid barking dog, a coif of vipers, a rotting skull teeming with wasps, the sun.
Such gaffes make up scattered spots of entertainment among the partygoers, the resulting shrieks of horror or agony calling attention to the scene. It is true that a thief both bold enough and swift enough might be able to snatch up a mask and disappear into the crowd, leaving behind their victim as distraction, but nonetheless this method cannot be recommended to those who have yet to dedicate their convictions to the craft.
Rather, the more widely accepted technique is to charm one's victim into voluntary revelation, hopefully in a private alcove somewhere, with windows flung open wide enough for one to make their escape. "But enough of who you are - why don't you show me who you want to be?" is the traditional, if trite, approach, and if the ball is in full swing should be more than enough to land you a tête-à-tête. More elaborate intimacies may be inappropriate if your intention is to simply ransom the true face back, but if blackmail is to be involved, we trust you to have enough familiarity with your target to conduct yourself accordingly.
(A word of warning, though, of the fae with ambition. While not as nakedly antagonistic as, say, a steel set of jaws, removing an immaculate ivory mask to reveal the blazing countenance of Our Lady of the Firmaments might come as equal, if not more of, a shock.)
To reduce the unpredictability of such revelations, there are those who opt instead to make a parlor game of the unmasking, with rules and contrivances and so forth. "Show me my mother's face before she had a name," is a perfectly acceptable feint in these scenarios, as are "Show me the animal Aesop last ate", "Number your eyes by my wives and your teeth by my years", "Who would you be if you were my lover", and various riddling games in which one's partner must shapeshift into the answer.
The disadvantage of this technique is that such games are commonly played in groups, but with a sufficiently boisterous set of players and enough free-flowing wine, any half-decent rapscallion should be able to find an opportunity to make a grab for a face and scarper, or else discreetly secret one away amidst the festivities. The most vital thing is to keep careful track of who are wearing their true faces and who are not, for as the games and intimacies among players grow more involved, the distinction is apt to get blurred.
Having acquired a true face as trophy, you may now indulge in the luxurious phase of negotiation. Most fae will be more than happy to haggle for their face back, still warm in the afterglow of the party and magnanimous in their offers. Given, we trust, that you have not followed the example of the hapless thief who attended a masquerade, and of all the masks on display, chose to make off with a wrought iron one featuring curling horns and an ominous disposition. The fool kept the mask mounted in his study, and was unnerved to find its visage growing more ominous and grotesque with each day, while its owner, freed from the constraints of a true face, rose through the echelons of society as a gust of petals, the Lord High Minister, Lady Morivingen, a stampede of elk, a shower of sunbeams and gold, etc. As the mask glowered down at the thief relentlessly, grown hideous and malevolent, he became helplessly paranoid of its protean owner, seeing retribution lurking in every face and lack thereof.
In the end, his house burned down with him in it, and no such mask matching that description was ever recovered from the ashes, at least according to the report that the Lord High Minster penned.
Assuming you have exercised better judgement in your choice of quarry, the mask doubtless remains in your possession, its countenance perfectly pleasant and unmarred. You may be tempted to try it on for yourself. If you do, etiquette demands you attend the next masquerade, if only to pay the opportunity forward. Your body will be new to you at first, likely less lithe, less graceful, but that can all be remedied. Return home to your estate. Bathe in dew. Wash off the dust of mortality. Rehearse the facades you will wear, underneath your true face.
Text: Fae balls appear Venetian, but those masks are their real faces. Stealing one is harder than it looks; whatever fake they have hiding underneath will try to confuse you by any means.
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All the chores you need to do to keep a household running - dishes, laundry, dusting, mopping, changing bed sheets, mowing the grass, cleaning out the gutters, the toilets, the grout, the tiles, the oven, the sticky film pooled at the bottom of the refrigerator shelves - none of it improves anything. It's not even maintenance. Underneath it all, paint peels, wood rots, metal rusts. Light bulbs burn out, floorboards scuff, white walls grow dingy. Everything succumbs to the slow entropic process of decay. Not to mention trying to improve the world outside your home.
So, if you're sick and tired of your body - aching, creaky, sagging, worn-down, listless, leaky plumbing, its stuccoed walls of cellulite stubbornly refusing to disappear - then remodel. Find the shapeshifter. Ask her for a new one. You'll probably have to move some furniture around, shove the couch away from the wall to find her: a grainy face discolored into the plaster, splotched with dust bunny-soot. Or maybe she'll be beneath the sink with splintered cheeks, giving you a corroded grin; or else squinting at your from between the planks in the attic, hair hanging lank like cobwebs; or in the walls themselves, splotched with mold and foaming insulation, studded eyes glittering in the dark.
It may be unnerving, to look her in the face for once. Don't worry. You'll find her eventually. Just keep digging. In, in.
Once you've found her, she'll fix your body any way you want it. Maybe make you lithe as wood again, or make you all glass and steel and gleaming, or rebuild you brick by brick, one thing on top of another, sinking into mortar, nestled together, each slab solidly in place. Dream big now. Ask for anything. Become a thatched roof cottage with roses growing along your trellis, rustic stone walkway, fire crackling merrily in the hearth. Ask for high ceilings and bay windows to give you a view of the ocean, granite countertops, a walk-in closet. Give yourself a reading nook. A breakfast nook. Mahogany hardwood floors. Graft on a home theater. A smart kitchen. Hell, make yourself self-cleaning. Roll out carpets from wall to wall.
Of course, entropy will still set in. That part's inevitable. No matter how new you are, or how many surgeries you went through to get here. Rain will fall, and sun will shine, and wood will fade, and water spots will glaze your windows. Dust will gather on every available surface. Sheen'll wear off. Rot grows, imperceptibly. Ants, termites find their way in.
But this time, if you sit empty long enough, hopefully you'll feel footsteps moving inside you. A set of hands wiping away the dust. And then all of it, all over again - the sweeping, the mopping, the dusting, the scrubbing, the spraying, the unclogging. The stains in your carpet, the scuff marks on your floor. The shower running, the toilet flushing, bottles and jars and boxes filling your countertops and cupboards. A light turning off at night, a weight turning over. A new person in you, making themselves at home.
Deep Water Prompt #1328
They say the old manor house doesn’t have tenants, just one shapeshifter. They say her real face is hidden in there, and if you can find it, she’ll fix your body however you want it.
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"Ethically sourced!" my mother would insist, whenever protesters came by, or whenever a customer seemed on the verge of recoiling in disgust. "Not like hides! Not like skin at all. Teeth fall out all the time. You see? Rotten." She'd spill the selkie teeth out on the counter, their edges rasped like strange frilled fungi, fractal, branching, and turn them over, revealing the cracks in the yellowed enamel, the hollowed core, the rot. "Everyone loses teeth," she'd say, and smile widely, revealing the glistening sockets of her gums. It made her look more than her age. Doddering. Harmless. "Not like skin. Don't worry, don't worry. Selkies probably don't even miss them. I find them by the shore. The tide pools, if you know where to look."
This wasn't the sales pitch she gave to the men who showed interest. Then she'd lower her voice, cup her hand around the jar to hide it from the view of the street, as if it was contraband or worse. "What chance you think you have, finding a selkie skin?" she'd say. Voice low, eyes peeking up at them, almost seductive. "Running across a group of girls bathing by the shore? Lucky? Not that lucky, no. But these selkie teeth, you grind one up, put it in your tea. Your true love will visit. This - this is a piece of her." She'd hold up one of those rotten teeth, turn it, like it was a jewel catching the light. "Just a piece. But a tooth that her tongue passed over once in the dark behind her lips, embedded in her, kissing the bone. You can't make her stay, but you drink this, she'll come to you. She must. She'll visit you. You'll have a chance."
To the mourning, she'd tell another story. "It's like a missing tooth, yes?" she'd say, and smile again to show her gums, making herself look wounded this time, tragic, like the world and time had cut out parts of her, left those gaps. "I know it myself. Your tongue keeps coming back to the place where it used to be, feeling for something. The loss. The ache." She'd tap a tooth on the counter, letting it letting it ring out hollowly, turning it to show the cavity. "Grind this up. Put it in your tea as sugar. It'll be that old, sweet ache again. You'll see them one last time. I promise you that."
I don't know which of her stories were true. I never got to taste the tea for myself. We only had a limited number of selkie teeth, and they were much too precious for me to try one. After we ran out of teeth, we started selling selkie leather, a much more precarious proposition. The hide had been slashed up and ruined, but we cut it into strips, sold them as bracelets and charms. It was functionally impossible to argue that selkie leather could be gotten without exploitation, and so we resorted to a much seedier market, hawking contraband for real this time. With practice, I adapted my mother's tricks and honed them, learning how to lower my voice like she did, weave the lurid fantasies like she did. Other innovations, like clutching the leather beforehand so it would gain the warmth of a human body, displaying it draped over the brown of my skin.
The leather, I think, was total bullshit. Did nothing. We moved around too often to hear complaints. But the teeth were real, or at least no one ever came back to the store to complain about them. It was how my mother got the idea to start selling the teeth to begin with, grinding her teeth at night, dreaming. She never told me who she saw in her dreams. I don't think it was my father. I don't want to think it was him, but it might have been. Every time she'd put one of the teeth into a mortar, crush it, grind down the enamel, I'd flinch. Get sick just hearing it. That wound was love, everything she did to keep me fed and clothed and cared for. It must have been bloody once, newly-made and throbbing, a wound that ran all the way down to the heart.
Deep Water Prompt #3126
“Selkie teeth”, my mother says, shaking a jar of them. “Grind one up and stir the powder into tea. Your true love will visit you, or come as a dream if they are already dead.”
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The Kingdom of Iqina comprises primarily of void, its sole distinguishing feature being the Royal Palace of its capital, encased within a sparkling dome. The Iqinian Royal Family claims to exercise absolute sovereign control over their kingdom - unlike other nations, which suffer internal dissent and riots and social upheavals, the Royal Family has gone unchallenged for the entirety of their reign, and remains the singular authority in all the land.
The nation since its founding has only known an unbroken era of peace and lawfulness; crime is at zero; it boasts an exhaustively accurate census of its population and resources, plus or minus the occasional stray asteroid. It has the lowest unemployment rate and highest wealth per capita as compared to all the various terrestrial countries. It is, in short, the platonic ideal of a nation - the center, and the territory, and nothing else.
There are those who will protest that Iqina cannot enforce its borders, and thus has no authority over them, being sealed completely as they are in their dome. But a sovereign surely cannot be expected to administer their entire territory firsthand, and it is no disqualification for princes and princesses to find themselves insulated in their palaces. Besides, among all nations, Iqina is alone in suffering no invasions or incursions or breaches whatsoever of its border, defended as they are by the natural fortifications of a lack of air, ground, material medium in which to facilitate travel, etc.
There are those still who will claim that Iqina has no borders, and that the Royal Palace is a delusional gilded speck that drifts through the void unmoored. But in the Palace they maintain that Iqina remains fixed in its position at the center of the cosmos, and it is the rest of the universe that moves around it. In their dances, they move lightly, barely beholden to gravity, toetips gliding gracefully across the ballroom floor.
Deep Water Prompt #3120
The Palace sits under its dome, shining and impenetrable against the obsidian void of space. I hear they keep the gravity low inside, so the princes and princesses all but float across the floor.
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To Jack-of-All-Trades, LLC:
It was on the urging of your advertisement in last month's issue of Better Tomes and Cauldrons that I was induced to purchase from you one common house spider that, according to your numerous and grandiloquent claims, had spent no less than one hundred years residing in the cottage of one Heptcuba Severn, sustained by her residual magic. Your advertisement went on to claim that this common house spider would—and here I quote—"have the secrets of a century-spanning lifetime spent looking over Heptcuba's shoulder to teach", the jittery and indistinct language of insects magnified into comprehension under the scrutiny of your specialty scrying glass.
Knowing well Heptcuba's reputation as a practitioner of magic, and in the aftermath of her recent passing and the liquidation of her estate, I was enticed by these promises to send to you by mail one hundred and seventy gold regents for the purchase of both the spider and the glass.
The scrying glass, I will acknowledge, worked as promised. The barest motion of the spider's hairs and filaments beneath the lens were translated into sweeping signs and glyphs, spelled out so clearly that I had no issues with our back-and-forth communication. The spider, on the other hand, most definitely did not live up to the promised expectations.
As to whether this spider truly was a hundred years old, and whether or not it truly did live in Heptcuba's house, I was unable to get any meaningful confirmation from it on the matter. The spider did describe in great detail the corner of a cottage that might have been Heptcuba's—a rafter and the juncture of two walls—and a large blurred figure that plodded back and forth beneath, who may or may not have been Heptcuba herself, but beyond that was unable to provide any remotely distinguishing details whatsoever, having extremely poor eyesight and being unable to understand human speech without some sort of intermediary device. It was also able to provide a thorough accounting of the population of insects that inhabited the cottage—so many houseflies a week, and ants and midges and earwigs and so on—but none of that did me any good whatsoever in identifying its household of origin.
As to its age, it was only insistent that it had lived "an awfully long time", and was unable to count higher than eight, although it did appear to have some sort of system of measurement involving the drawing out of silk thread and its subsequent knotting and crossing, which it spent several hours trying to explain to me, but which I was ultimately unable to understand.
In fact, most of my conversations with the spider followed this pattern, being inane digressions into webs and their construction, or else the entrapment and binding of other insects, all drawn out into a pseudo-poetic ramble about how these minutia constituted the meaning of life, or some other incomprehensible philosophizing.
I am almost willing to believe that this spider did indeed spend a century living in Heptcuba's cottage, as it was completely ignorant of anything other than its web and the insects that were caught in it and its dark little corner. The sight of my garden awed it (It described the bark of a tree as "wall that bulges and swells like the backs of flymeal, something living"). To explain to the spider that there had been a more important figure living in the house other than itself—much less that there was a world outside of the house, and many, many houses beyond that, making up kingdoms and cities and schools of magic, and that the past hundred years had involved vast populations of people caught up in wars and revolutions and discoveries—would have all been far beyond its scope of comprehension.
Lastly—though I now realize that perhaps this was foreseeable given that the advertisement clearly stated that the spider had been sustained by Heptcuba's magic—the spider lived only a scant week and a half after its arrival, and gradually withered and died despite my best attempts to preserve it.
Given the general substandard quality of your provided product, and the deeply misleading advertising, I feel entirely justified in demanding a full refund of my one hundred and seventy regents, leaving aside additional expenses accrued, such as the specialty diet of damselflies and the services of a faerie stablehand. Anything less than a full refund will leave me no recourse but to take this matter to the courts, and to cast a curse thrice-over upon your name, your two good eyes, and all your kin, may you rot damned in the light of the graveyard moon.
The spider, as I have said, is dead, though the scrying glass remains in good condition and I am willing to ship it back to you.
Yours in disappointment,
Amanita Gross
--
Dear Amanita,
While we here at JoAT, LLC are of course regretful that any of our customers come away from a deal dissatisfied, I do have to point out that every promise made was kept. You yourself admitted that after talking to the spider extensively, it seems entirely likely that it spent the last century curled up in the dark corner of some cottage. Our advertisements promised no less.
JoAT, LLC is perfectly willing to provide certification that the spider you purchased was in fact sourced from Heptcuba Severn's estate, and spectro-dating the body should be more than enough to prove its age.
While you may feel disappointed that the life lessons it had to teach aren't the ones you wanted to learn, consider that maybe a century's worth of perspective isn't always what you're going to be expecting. Just because you couldn't wrap your mind around a spider's conception of time, doesn't make it any less meaningful.
While we've spent the last hundred years getting into wars and overthrowing each other and occasionally coming up with a new war machine or whatever, you've gotten a rare opportunity to converse with a creature that spent a hundred years contemplating its own web. Creating. Re-creating. Perfecting the strands. Living a hundred years longer than it should have to reach the apotheosis of what that single moment has to offer.
And then, at the end of its long, long life, moving past that familiar pattern to discover something new.
You got to teach it trees, Amanita! Trees! The leaves, the flowers, the pollen carried on the breeze, the bright blue vault of sky. The sun. Heptcuba was a great witch, and she carried countless tiny lives with her, buoyed along by her magic. When she died, she took the floor out with her. That spider was one of the last memories of Heptcuba left. You've spent the last week and a half making an old, old soul very happy.
Isn't that worth more than a measly 170 regents?
Love,
Jack
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PS: Look at the ad again and read the fine print, under the cobweb, the flyspecks. All sales final. No refunds!
-
PPS: OK, 30 regents if you send the scrying glass back in good condition, best offer.
Text: The spiders that live in the corners of any witch’s house can live for a hundred years on residual magics. They have plenty to teach you, if you can get one under a glass.
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I'm embarrassed to admit I think I've been haunting my own apartment. The exorcist says she's never seen anything like it. Ghosts are mostly just memories of a previous occupant imprinted into the architecture, she says. Floorboards that miss the weight of footsteps, lonesome, bending and creaking on their own accord. Upholstery, wallpaper, the air itself worn thin by weight and presence. The shape of a person haunting the furnishings of a home.
Now that she's said it, I can tell that it's my imprint in the mattress. My height. Roughly my shape, if my skin sagged and spread out a little. A blurred outline of me discoloring the bedsheets. My face, my belly, my thighs, the sallow aura of my sebum and sweat and dead skin cells, my lips parted like a drowned and gasping corpse - apparently I mouthbreathe when I sleep, who knew?
Have I been away on vacation, the exorcist suggests? Do I have another house elsewhere and this is my pied-à-terre? Perhaps I'm terrifically social, always out flitting from one place to another, only coming back here to collapse into bed and fall asleep, and that's why my apartment misses me even though technically I'm still living here? No. No. Not at all, I tell her. No. Well, you can usually get rid of ghosts by just changing up the furnishings, she suggests at last. Change the sheets, get a new mattress - or maybe just turn this one over, air it out, maybe that'll do some good - she knows how expensive it can be to refurbish. That's not even counting the lumpy body on the sofa, only half-visible by the glow of the television; or my phantom etched out by the soap scum in the shower; or the ghost of me pressed up against the kitchen sink, leaving fingerprints on the dishes, ghostly streaks on the glass.
I wonder out loud if a haunting is going to count against my deposit. Uh, you'll have to check the terms of your lease, she says. That's not part of my expertise. She leans over the ghost on my bed and gives it one last halfhearted swipe.
I keep waiting for her to do something, make another suggestion, tell me how to fix this, the ghost of myself sweating up the bedspread in front of us, slowly coming apart like a corpse, and things get so uncomfortable that instead she starts talking about other ghosts she's encountered in her line of work, other houses. Sometimes they get in deep, she shrugs. Nothing to be done about it. She tells me about a haunted plumbing system she had to deal with once. The faucets wept with the tears of the previous occupant, hollow sobs echoing through the pipes. A deep, persistent misery. They'd've had to tear out all the plumbing, uproot their floors, replace everything to exorcise the ghost, she says. Not worth it. I told them to just run the faucets to flush out the tears before using. Simple, yeah? she says, and I picture sink drains, shower drains, a dark wet gurgling hole lined with tangled hair and the detritus of a human body. Let 'em cry it out, she says. Wash it clean.
Deep Water Prompt #3112
Sometimes, a ghost is just the house remembering. The tears of some long gone soul drip out of our faucets. A patch of mousy brown hair grows directly out of the dining room table.
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