Stories

“I think I speak for everybody when I say that bringing this curse into the Council Hall is a disrespectful and irresponsible act one hoped not to expect from a member of your standing!” Rosemary hissed at Lucille, who had just walked in, holding the object of contention. “Naturally,” she thought, “who else would be the first to find out about the black mirror but our sweet Rosemary! On second tho...

Understanding the old language became increasingly challenging over time, and the hopes of making heads or tails of it diminished, even for Mary, who, despite the unfortunate circumstances of her birth was an unbridled optimist. She spent endless nights, risking her aunt's chastising, trying to decipher the meaning of the fragments they had translated, and it felt more and more like trying to mend...

The cave find became the focus of attention for the entire village. Their community hadn't had anything exciting to talk about since most of its members could remember, and the discovery of something both fascinating and inaccessible kept everybody on the edge of their seats with anticipation. Public discussions about mirrors became so commonplace that even Mrs. Gentry gave up protesting eventuall...

“We're never going to figure this out,” Lucille said, dejected. “Not only don't I know most of the words' equivalents, but I don't understand their meaning, either. Even the short sentences I translated make absolutely no sense to me. What on earth is ‘meta property vr canonical content’? Why are we doing this?” she looked at Mary, exasperated. The girl, as always, donned a perplexed gaze. The loo...

The Circle meeting was quite boring, filled with organizational issues and the usual polite gossip. Lucille found it hard to pay attention to things she'd been hearing for decades, especially now when she was on pins and needles, filled with curiosity over the contents of the Que'd. She was lost in thought, trying to make sense of the few words she managed to recall from her childhood, words that...

'Great mercy, it's all here! Oh, girl, what have you uncovered!' Lucille thought, turning apprehensive eyes towards Mary, to see if her niece had any idea about the importance of her finding. It only took one glance to ascertain that Mary knew she was holding the long lost copy of the Que'd. They looked at each other for a while, in a tacit understanding that any knowledge driven from the precious...

“What is the Scholars' line, aunt Lucille?” Mary asked, braving her aunt's stormy looks. The room was quiet for a few moments. Normally Lucille would have chastened the uncouth youth for asking such an impertinent question, but under the circumstances it dawned on her that the spirit of cooperation might bring to the surface details that her niece would otherwise not think of sharing with her. She...

Despite Lucille's constant rebukes Mary became fascinated with the story of the Prophecy and didn't miss a chance to sneak up into the attic and read it again and again, until she learned its unpleasant contents by heart. It gave her a strange feeling, this story about her, written generations before she'd been born, the script of her life. It didn't even make her bitter anymore, just filled her w...

After the council meeting ended, Lucille skipped the usual tea and cookies and headed straight home. She made a beeline for the attic where she opened an old coffer, covered with a thick layer of dust. Its contents were arranged with great care, like one would for long term safe-keeping, breakable items interspersed with delicate linen and fabrics protected from moths and mildew with shards of ced...

Nothing in society exceeds the speed of gossip. By the time Lucille arrived to the Council Hall, its usually quiet chambers were buzzing like a beehive. All the ladies were there, a feat that hadn’t happened in decades, and the animated conversation subsided suspiciously upon Lucille’s arrival.

"Why is it wrong, aunt Lucille? What's so wrong about knowing what you look like?" she stared at her aunt, giving the latter the chills. “Those eyes could keep a person awake at night,” Lucille shuddered, “I can't get used to them, no matter how innocent she is, so help me! She knows, the imp, how could she possibly know?” Lucille looked for a reasonable explanation for the mirror ban, but couldn'...

As predicted, a couple of the most involved members of the ladies' circle showed up at Lucille's door within hours, with appropriately concerned looks on their faces and spelling trouble from a distance. Lucille crushed a few choice words between her teeth and remembered to smile. She sometimes wished that the mores of their society allowed women to express frustration in the same care free and ir...

Mary arrived home before the break of dawn. She tried to make as little noise as possible, knowing full well that she couldn't bypass aunt Lucille's superhuman scrutiny. The old lady had the senses and instincts of a mountain lion. As expected, her great-aunt was waiting for her in the kitchen, seated at the table with a prayer book in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, in order to press th...

"Stop lollygagging, Mary! The world is not going to wait for you to catch up, it's almost sundown!" Mary's great-aunt Lucille scolded her, as it was her habit. Mary didn't flinch, she knew how difficult it was for people to be around her, and how much gratitude she owed to the one person gracious enough to take her in. The shocked reaction everybody had when they laid eyes on Mary was a never endi...

Jack’s thirst for the interesting and the unusual was never quenched, and since he was so good at making stuff up he decided to put his talents to good use and become a professional liar. A fiction writer, that is. He flirted with journalism for a little bit, but after his own unpalatable experience with revelations and consequences, he decided that this field really wasn’t for him. He did some tr...

“On a happier note, how is your life lately?” Richard tried to change the subject, only managing to add more gas on Jack’s emotional pyre. “I’m in counseling with a child psychologist, thank you for asking. I got to revisit every second of my life, forwards, backwards and out of sequence, I discussed any and all childhood trauma that I might have been subjected to, I looked deep inside myself to f...

“I’m just saying,” Richard gasped, struggling to dislodge a large rock from the middle of the border he was trying to define, a place from which the cursed thing refused to budge. “You know, if our parents wanted to devise a punishment for our creative truth telling, this would probably be it!” “Don’t mess with karma, dude!” Jack said philosophically, suddenly distracted by the fact that digging g...

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants. Richard’s family membe...

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants.

“It is a living entity,” the biologist replied. “What part of it, the plant and the extension ducts?” the other speaker replied. “We already know that!”  “No, not only those, everything that it interacts with, the wall, the dome, the wildlife inside it, well, by extension, every person that enters it,” the biologist smiled. The audience gasped. For months, rumors of the plant being capable of inte...

It’s not that people don’t expect life to change, it is the way that change comes about that always catches them unprepared. Sometimes it is as trivial as rain on the day of the picnic that everybody had spent months planning and looking forward to, or as significant as a shift in circumstances that makes one’s life plans lose consistency, but these are things that people usually adapt to, that th...

Richard wasn’t the only one who found a way to put the plant/machine hybrid to good use, and as bio-based gadgets ceased to be an oddity, the town was soon awash with them, and they all looked strangely alive, as if nature had decided to grace the planet with a whole new branch of species, all at once. As it happens when life challenges ingrained concepts about what things are possible, it only ta...

At times like these he stopped thinking of this large living conglomerate in terms of good or bad. One doesn’t question whether the squirrels or the lions, or the grass of the plain, are good or bad, they just are, and so is the sun in the sky and the snow on the mountains. When you open your eyes to life and see them for the first time, you don’t judge whether they belong or whether you belong. T...

The plant reached the back wall and went through it, as if it didn’t encounter any resistance, as if the wall wasn’t there at all. It was very strange how the two systems crossed without interacting, like they belonged to parallel realities, or different time lines. There didn’t seem to be a wall cavity where  the hybrid pipe penetrated it, and through the vaguely translucent material of the new b...