Two Women and Some Books
Ice cream on my tongue
Today I got brave and I licked him
Just with the tip of my tongue
He jumped just as if I had kicked him
I sometimes forget he is young
One more taste, shy as a whisper
As he twines his hands in my hair
Eat me then, he says, little twister
Eat me, as much as you dare
It was very quiet in this area of the stacks, so quiet that if you listened carefully enough you could hear the books breathing. This portentous silence was broken by a rhythmic squeak as a trolley loaded with grimoires and magical texts was pushed firmly towards the dark corner wherein such resided.
“It’s no good you being like that,” a determined voice said. “It doesn’t hurt being shelved. It’s not as if any of you are chained. Although if some of you keep misbehaving…”
The rhythmic squeal stopped and the trolley rounded a corner, being pushed by a dumpy girl with a determined looking chin. As it neared the shelves where arcane and magical volumes were shelved the squeal started up again.
“Does somebody want to be shelved on 99b?”
Silence.
The dumpy girl began shelving volumes with practiced efficiency. She handled the books with care and respect, but would brook no resistance nor any other tricks. One of the grimoires snapped its covers at her and she slapped it firmly.
“Start that with me and I’ll chain you.”
If it was possible for a book to look abashed it did so, coming quietly to hand to be slipped into its accustomed place.
Once the grimoires were tidily placed in their proper positions, the Night Librarian closed the steel doors around their stack and locked them with a hugely ornate key.
On her way back to the centre desk, she paused briefly at travel and pointed an imperious finger. There was a bit of scrabbling as the books reshelved themselves in their proper order, followed by an embarrassed silence.
“Papua New Guinea, since when have you lived between Jersey and Guernsey?”
A dog eared volume leapt from a shelf and scuttled off. The girl regarded the now tidy stack for a moment before permitting herself a small smile.
“Better.”
She turned on her heel pushing the now empty trolley to the store room where it would be filled by the day staff who were far too busy to ever shelve books.
As they saw it, that was her job and the business of shelving had already taken a goodly part of the night, but at least there was just one full trolley left. She looked at it with some disfavour before grasping the handles firmly. Immediately they turned warm, and furry and she could feel tiny tentacles caressing the thin skin inside her wrists.
“Stop that at once,” she frowned awfully and the trolley behaved as she pushed it past Young Adult, Alternative History, and Romance to its designated area: Erotica.
“Here we are,” she said brightly, “your stop”.
These stacks were somehow claustrophobic, and the air was thick and heavy with what could be felt as either threat or promise. The young librarian appeared to feel neither as she simply proceeded with her work.
“Lesbian romance,” she clapped her hands and a half dozen or so volumes jumped from the trolley and shelved themselves neatly among their peers. She carried on, briskly calling out names and categories and the books kept obeying, even if she did feel the occasional groping hand as they passed her by.
Finally there were just two books left glowering at her from the trolley. “Extreme punishment, am I to assume you are unwilling to shelve yourselves like sensible books?”
There was a sudden sullenness in the air and she sighed.
“You lot are more trouble than grimoires.”
Pushing the trolley further into an aisle, where the atmosphere was warm and redolent of body fluids and full of the sounds of moans and curses, she stopped in front of a shelf where her senses were assaulted by cries of pain and the whistle of the whiplash. She picked up the first book and slipped it into its allotted position with very little difficulty. The second snarled at her as she put out her hand. Nothing daunted, she slapped it on its stained cover. It retaliated, and she felt the phantom bite of a whip across her shoulders. She smiled thinly and picked the volume up by its spine.
“Somebody masturbate on you today?”
The book wriggled at the pleasurable memory and she pushed it into its vacant slot before exiting the erotica stack with as much dignity as she could muster.
Back at the central desk, she began the second part of her duties. She worked diligently inputting details of loaned volumes and returns, clicking her tongue at inaccuracies and omissions as she slowly reduced the pile of official dockets, dirty slips of paper, scented notes and IOUs. She had almost finished when she was interrupted by a polite cough.
“Yes,” she said without looking up.
“Please miss, there’s a something roaming the stacks and we is afraid.”
The librarian turned to look at at the speaker. She was surprised to see a whole deputation of small creatures looking at her hopefully. There were brownies, gnomes, elves, rabbits, squirrels, hobbits, borrowers and too many others to mention. Most of these species disliked and distrusted each other, so their banding together portended something of considerable dark power. She shrugged internally and bent her gaze on the spokesperson: a tiggywinkle.
“What sort of a something?”
The hedgehog dropped a nervous curtesy.
“We doesn’t know ma’am. But we hears it and we knows it is hungry.”
“Oh. One of those. You wait here then.”
The Night Librarian took two things out of her capacious handbag, and two more things out of a drawer beside her left foot.
“Okay. You lot stay here. I will deal.”
She strode off along the silent shelves, noticing for the first time how afraid the books were and how they were all trying to make themselves small and insignificant. Reaching the section of the library given over to Dark Magicks, she checked to see that the grimoires were still locked in before taking a very large salt pot out of her pocket. She uncapped it and began to draw a complex pattern on the stained stones of the floor. When she was satisfied she put the salt pot away and brought out a spray bottle of water, which she uncapped before stabbing her thumb with the silver pin of the brooch she wore at the neck of her modest little blouse. She allowed a carefully counted number of drops of blood to mix with the water before briskly recapping the bottle. Walking around the salty pattern, she carefully sprayed a mist of the pink solution around the edges of the pentagram. She smiled thinly and stepped into the centre of the design. Placing the bottle on the floor between her feet she muttered an incantation. And waited.
At first nothing happened, but then a slithering sliding sort of noise, overlain by a toothache-inducing scrape became audible, and the girl in the pentagram felt a sense of resistance. She muttered a few more words and the slithering came closer. A reptilian head with glowing yellow eyes came around the corner, followed by a scaly winged body balanced on short front legs and longer legs at the rear. The creature boasted powerful hindquarters, and massively muscled shoulders decorated with dark leathery wings. As it drew near, the uncomfortable scraping sound could be traced to the creature’s talons fruitlessly digging the ground as it tried to resist the pull of the Librarian’s incantation.
It stopped at the edge of the pentagram, swishing a tail whose spiked end could disembowel a man. Peering shortsightedly into the centre of the salty lines it snarled at the unimpressive figure who had nonetheless managed to drag its unwilling carcass across the floor without breaking a sweat.
“I hunger. I thirst.” It hissed.
“I expect you do, but there is naught here for you.”
“You are here.”
“And I am protected within walls of power.”
The dragon, for dragon it was, sneered and swiped at the salty lines with one clawed forefoot. Nothing moved. It hissed again and tried harder.
“Even if you could disturb the pattern, that which is written on stone and sealed with holy water and blood cannot be removed until I release it.”
The dragon ground it’s teeth and hissed viciously, but the Librarian would not be intimidated. She narrowed her eyes and concentrated briefly.
“Stop that T’Drell. Instead of being stupid tell me how you got here and why you came here.”
The dragon shook its head.
“I do not know. I cannot tell. Asleep I was. Then found myself here. Wandering. Alone. Hungry. Angry.”
“Would you return to Dragonheart?”
“I would.”
“Very well. Be still.”
T’Drell laid his head on the stones and became absolutely motionless as the Librarian began her incantation. As he began to fade he lifted his eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
By Jane Jago - You can read the conclusion of this story on Thursday.
Give up the booze, they said
Look what it’s done to your life
Seventeen children, they said
And not even once a wife
Give up the fags, they said
And you shouldn’t be dressing like that
Give up the choccies and cheese
Or you will wind up friendless and fat
I have no regrets, she said
My children are straight and strong
I conceived them all sober, she said
And that’s where you’re getting it wrong
Life’s not the place, she said
For your poor-mouthed censorious ways
I’m living the way I think best
And I’ll dance to the end of my days
©️ jane jago 2017
From A Walking Shadow, the final book in Haruspex Trilogy of Fortune's Fools by E.M. Swift-Hook.
When the ship finally opened up, Stin stood waiting with Panvia, who still held her tea and was sipping at it. He helped her to kick the blocks to the ramp in an ultra low-tech parody of the way a dock would normally autosecure.
The first person out seemed more as though he was expecting to meet an armed assault than a middle-aged maintenance technician sipping a cup of tea. He held an energy snub in one hand and looked more than willing to use it. He wore a slightly garish, military cut outfit and his black hair pulled back into a short ponytail, separating on one side around the slight lump of a skull implanted port.
Panvia completely ignored the weaponry and lifted her mug.
“If you want a cuppa, I’ve something warm and spiced on the brew. It’ll help get your innards used to the local micro-flora and fauna. Tastes pretty good too.”
The black haired man didn’t reply, he finished his visual check of the environment and apparently satisfied that there wasn’t a secret ambush waiting in the shadows, moved aside.
“Tea sounds good to me.” The reply came from a second man who emerged from the ship. This one was dressed like he was attending a debut event in Central, but with a shaggy mane of golden blond curly hair tempering the effect. “And your tea always tastes good, Pan.”
Panvia’s normally dour expression lightened to something that nearly approached a smile.
“You look like you could do with it, too. You been living on all that alien muck too long.”
Any reply the blond man might have made was cut short by a shout of unmitigated delight from the entrance to the dock.
“Durban,” Gernie called and strode over to the ship with a huge grin on his round face.” You know until I saw you just now I was only half-convinced it really was you. When you sailed out of here with that cargo I was thinking that was it. That you’d use it to set yourself up – somewhere nice in the Middle Worlds, maybe the ‘City. Or possibly, knowing you, even Central way. Why the hell would you want to come back here, man?”
He finished the speech as he reached the blond man and threw his arms around him in a close embrace which was returned with mutual back slapping. The man with the ponytail moved sharply, clearly worried and only relaxed when Gernie released his victim and stepped back, still smiling. “They still talk about you in Micha’s from when you were first here that winter we met. How long ago was that now?”
“Too many years, maybe even too many decades,” the blond man said, his own smile as warm as Gernie’s. Then he looked directly at Stin. “This a new member of your ground crew?”
Gernie followed his look, turning to see.
“Oh, that’s one of our waifs and strays. Stinian. His girlfriend dumped him and jumped out. He helps out to earn his passage one day.”
“Harmless?”
“Mostly, for sure. Aren’t you Stin?” Now what was he supposed to say to that?
“I guess,” he agreed.
Gernie had already turned away again, his back to Stin.
“This your latest boyfriend?” he was asking, nodding at the man with the black hair and the scalp port. The blond man, Durban, laughed.
“Jaz is a friend – a very good friend.”
The other man, Jaz, seemed unconcerned by Gernie’s assumption. He seemed to still be expecting some kind of trouble. Or maybe that was just his normal way of being.
A Walking Shadow is available for pre-order now.
She watched them go towards the gate, with Bonnie leading the way and Bill riding on his uncle’s shoulders. On impulse she dug out her phone and took a picture of the happy foursome. Then she grinned and made a call.
“Pats. We’re gonna be a while yet. We’ve barely got out of Scotland. Adults too tired to drive any further. Rod was wiped. He loves Bill a lot, and the worry took its toll. So. We’ve had a huge breakfast, and now the boys have taken Bonnie and Bill for a run. I should imagine it’ll be eleven before we get off. Yeah. Depending on stops. Very late tonight. Or tomorrow. I’m sorry you are being kept waiting, but we’re keeping things as normal as possible for Bill. Of course. I thought you’d understand. I’ll let him phone you once we are on the road. In the meantime, I couldn’t resist this image.”
She sent the picture she had just taken, and awaited reaction.
The next voice she heard was Jim.
“She’s having a happy cry. Just seeing him helped. A lot.”
“Should’ve done it before, shouldn’t I? In my defence I do have to say I was too tired to think straight. Though I should’ve taken a shot of him in my bed with Rod and Bonnie, and his bloody jumper. I will tonight if we don’t make it home. See you soon.”
She smiled at her phone then hurried into the pub to see if she could persuade them to sell her some foodstuffs. Fortunately they were amenable so when the quartet returned from their run, she had a full fridge, and everything else tied down ready for travel. Rod took Bill to the toilet, and Sam stood in the doorway of the camper grinning up at her with Bonnie at his side.
“That did us all good. Specially the wee man, who wound up running round and round in circles and throwing earth at Rod who pretended wrath, but was as pleased as punch to see how Bill is gradually relaxing. Those two are exceptionally close.”
“They are. Rod is Bill’s Sponsor?”
“Sponsor?”
“Kinda like a Godparent, but the responsibility is taken much more seriously. Rod sees himself as a sort of third parent. Which is good for him, and good for Bill who is, when left to his own devices, a somewhat solemn old-fashioned child. But when he’s with Rod he positively glows with fun and cheekiness.”
“Yeah. I got that. But where does the old-fashioned reserve come from?”
“Oh. He’s like his grandfather. Patsy’s Dad. He was a copper like my father, and they were both big, quiet, reserved men with strong and old-fashioned values. He even looks a bit like a brown-skinned Uncle Reg.”
“Uncle?”
“Nah. Unfortunately not. But we were neighbours, and Patsy’s family looked out for me, because my own mother despised me.”
He put out a hand impulsively.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake up old troubles.”
She smiled at him.
“It’s okay. I think. I didn’t mind telling you. You are a very calm presence.”
He smiled back.
“Well then. Are you going to give me your number?”
“Do you want it?”
“Yeah. Or I wouldn’t have asked.”
“I’ll think about it” she grinned cheekily. “Here come Little and Large. I think you or I will have to sit next to Billy Boy. The seat isn’t big enough for Rod.”
“Probably not. Are there seatbelts?”
“There are. I’ve even pulled them out of hiding. So we’re ready for the off.”
Then she beckoned to Rod and Bill, and Bonnie who had gone to meet them
“Come on you lot. Time to be off. Who is taking the first stint at driving?”
‘I would’ Rod offered. ‘But I don’t know how to get back to the motorway from here.’
“I do,” Sam supplied. “So I’ll go first. Two-hour stints?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Anna agreed. “We can stop in four hours and have a snack. I’ve got sandwich fixings and a quiche I bought from the pub.”
Bill patted her approvingly.
“Clever Anna. I’m stuffed right now. But I’m sure we’ll all be hungry later.”
She picked him up and kissed both his rosy cheeks. “Window seat or aisle, sir?”
“Window please.”
They got themselves strapped in and Sam manoeuvred the camper out onto the village street.
“Brighton here we come.”
“Isn’t that a song?”
“No that’s California.”
“So it is.”
“Is California as nice as Brighton?” Bill asked.
“Some people would say it’s much nicer. But I reckon that’s down to your viewpoint. I like Brighton, because it’s home.”
“Me too” Bill agreed.
Anna dug out her phone.
“You wanna talk to Mummy and Daddy?”
“Oh yes. Please.”
“Go to it then.”
Dai Llewellyn was all but home when a gigantic figure loomed out of the darkness.
“Edbert, you spado, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
“No. I’m trying to save your life.”
“Come again?”
Edbert’s laughter rumbled deep in his massive barrel of a chest.
“Julia has been in the kitchen. All day.”
“Julia? In the kitchen?”
“Yes. She has decided she should learn to cook.”
Dai digested that one and braced himself just in time not to buckle at the knees when Edbert clapped him on the shoulder.
Julia met him at the door with Canis and Lupo at her heels. He bent to kiss her and she dimpled demurely.
“Good day, love?” He asked with careful mildness.
She lifted a shoulder. “Same old. Same old.”
He grinned down into her face, noticing signs of frustration at the back of her bitter chocolate eyes but deeming it safest to say nothing.
“Go and wash your hands, supper is ready.”
Dai ambled off, and he could swear he felt his wife’s eyes boring into his back. This, he thought, could be about to get sticky.
He returned to the winter sitting room, to find the table set and have his nostrils assailed by a savoury aroma.
“Something smells good.”
She showed him her small, white teeth and he gave her his best grin in return.
“Sit,” she said firmly, before serving him with a bowl of thick soup and a hunk of buttered bread.
She brought her own smaller portion and sat opposite him watching as he dipped his spoon into the bowl. He tasted with some trepidation but the soup was fine. It wasn’t as delicately flavoured by any means as Cookie’s handiwork but it was hot and meaty and filling and he had no complaints. He ate his bowlful and cleaned out the bowl with the end of his bread. Julia eyed him narrowly, and he smiled into her eyes.
“What’s up love?”
“Nothing. Why do you think there is something the matter?”
She got up with what was perilously close to a flounce and whisked away his bowl and side plate.
“Cheesecake?” she asked.
“Yes please.”
Julia brought a glass stand to the table, on which rested a cake decorated with raspberry sauce.
“That looks nice.”
She frowned at him and put a knife into the confection, which promptly collapsed with its undercooked centre dripping over the edges of the serving dish.
Dai knew he had to act quickly to avert a potential meltdown, so he stuck his finger in the gooey mess and licked it.
“Yum, yum,” he said before taking another dollop of goo and spreading it on his wife’s face.
She opened her mouth to protest and he forestalled her by pulling her across the table and licking her face, to which treatment she responded with some enthusiasm.
A considerable time later she lay in his arms and he grinned down at her.
“You can cook anytime you like….”
©️ Jane Jago 2017
The Challenge: You have one week to write your own Dai and Julia flash. Invent a new character and write five hundred words or less set in Dai and Julia's world in Londinium or Viriconium. To get the feel of this Alternate History world, why not check out the free sample 'Look Inside' available for The First Dai and Julia Omnibus. You can reference any of our characters, of course. Mail your entry to us here at workingtitleblogspot@gmail.com. All entries will be featured on the blog, with full credit of course. The best entry wins an ecopy of the Omnibus. Closing date 23 Dec 2017. Entries received after that date may not be included in the competition but may still be featured on this blog. Good luck.
An extract from 'Dying for a Home' from The First Dai and Julia Omnibus.
Less than an hour later Dai and Bryn were drinking in a downmarket dive across town from the Titus insulae. The Dog and Onion was a taberna in what constituted the ‘bad’ side of Viriconium. It shared a street with several nightclubs and most of the local residents could be assumed to be the kind who were not going to be earning their living by methods that were ethical even if they were occasionally legal.
Heads turned to see who had come in and one or two people quietly stood up and began making their way out. Dai was pleased to see that Bryn was getting well known in this community. His own status was probably too far beyond the horizon of these individuals’ social vision for them to know who he was by sight. Besides, as always when he was out doing groundwork, Dai had dressed down.
They took a seat by the main door and Bryn nodded to the woman who was serving behind the bar.
“She’s half of what counts for organised crime in this city. Aoife Broanan. She and her daughters.”
Aoife was in late middle age, overweight and with the hard eyed smile that Dai knew all too well from his years fighting crime in Londinium. She must have seen them arrive because once she had finished with the customer she was serving she came over and sat at their table. She glanced at Dai in brief assessing appreciation of his good looks, then fixed her attention on Bryn.
“Nice to see you SI Cartivel, what you doing here ruining my trade today?”
“Looking for someone, Aoife,” Bryn told her and showed her the three faces on his wristphone.
She pursed her lips and scowled. “Never seen them before. Sorry, can’t help you. But drinks on the house for all vigiles as usual.”
A moment later she was stalking back to the bar with a grace that seemed to belie her bulk.
“That went well,” Dai observed.
Bryn beamed back at him. “Better than I hoped.”
“I suppose it is good to have low expectations, then you are never disappointed. Shall we go?”
“What? And miss a free drink? We vigiles have a reputation to keep up Bard. Start turning down free drinks and next it’ll be no free sandwiches at lunchtime.”
Dai wondered what he was missing, but years of working with Bryn as his right hand had taught him to trust that there was something more here than he could see. So he sat back in his chair and smiled.
“You make a very good point. I hope the wine they have here is worth drinking.”
“The brandy is better. Local stuff.” Bryn’s eyes held high humour, but his face was straight. And Dai had to admit there was more than a touch of irony to think that this den of thieves was selling brandy produced by his own brother.
The drinks arrived, two shots of brandy in deep bellied glasses, brought over by Aoife in person and she set the tray down with a brief smile at Dai.
“Not seen you in here before, but if you come by again on your own sometime know you can have a warm welcome.”
“Now, Aoife, don’t go corrupting more of my vigiles,” Bryn chastised her. The woman turned her smile to embrace them both then winked and went back over to the bar. The brandy was indeed recognisable as Llewellyn produce, albeit one of the cheaper distillations. Bryn drank his in a couple of quick swigs and got to his feet.
“We’ve not got all day, you know, need to at least look like we’re making an effort to find these people. The Submagistratus is not going to be a happy man if word gets to him we’ve been lazing around in here.”
Dai downed the rest of his drink in one and followed Bryn out of the taberna and back onto the streets of Viriconium.
“So what was that all about?” Dai asked as they were getting into their all-wheeler. Bryn grinned at him and reached into a pocket to pull out a beermat decorated on one side with a local brewery’s logo and flipped it round so Dai could see the other side where the printed image had been pulled back to reveal a neat hand-blocked address.
“I think your baby blues touched our Aoife’s heart, Bard.” Then he ducked to avoid Dai’s fist.
The Dai and Julia Mysteries are written by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook
Dear Reader Who Writes,
It always behoves me to assume that there will be at least one new reader of my inspirational course on ‘How to Write a Book’. So to that gentle reader I doff my hat and reveal that I am none other than Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV – author of the brilliant and inventive novel, “Fatswhistle and Buchtooth”, a seminal work exploring the furthest conceptual reaches of science fiction and fantasy.
Today’s topic came to me a while ago and then I was distracted by my Muse offering other, more pressingly urgent dangleberries of wisdom and demanding that those took precedence. But then my focus was rehoned to the point by Mumsie walking into my writing cave, bearing her trademark pernod and gingerwine in a champagne flute with the inevitable green olive drifting in the murk. “Oh my god, Moons, this place stinks worse than a sumo wrestlers jock-strap!” I delicately pointed out that she was referring to my vetiver, bergamot and lemongrass aromatherapy oil, blended expressly to induce higher states of creativity.
Mummy was not, however, much impressed by this revelation. Instead she picked up my pristine first edition copy of Fatswhistle and Buchtooth and opened it, bending the spine and splattering droplets of her alcoholic creosote over it’s pages. Before I could recover from the horror of her deed, she had dropped the irreplaceably precious item back on my desk. “Don’t they say you can’t tell a book by the cover? Got it wrong with yours though. Shite inside and out.”
A book cover needs to be a visual precise of your prose. It should capture and enrapture the roving eye as a reader runs through the rows of books either on a shelf in a shop or on a scrolling screen. Yours must be the cover that cries out as that putative reader sifts through stacks of books to find their next favourite fiction.
But how is this achieved? If you read the academic artists they will talk of proportions, the Golden Mean, of colour strengths and shades and other esoteric claptrap. It is actually stunningly simple – make it red.
Red is the most eye-catching colour as everyone knows. We are all primally preprogrammed to see red as a signal of something requiring our attention. Therefore, so long as your cover is red your book will be read.
A more sophisticated and subtle touch can be achieved by drawing on that other universal colour combination guaranteed to draw the eye – black and yellow. Our perceptions are precisely honed to hover our eyes on anything that resembles hornets or wasps. So, if red is not appropriate for your magnificent tome – black and yellow may well serve the same end.
Of course, to be sure, combine the two concepts.
Oh and put a naked lady on it, ideally headless.
Follow these infallible rules and you will create a cover that none will miss and your book will bound from shelves be those physical or metaphorical.
Until next time, au revoir mes petites poissons.
He woke with a start. Glancing all around him, getting his bearings, he realized it was still dark, and most of his travelling companions still slept. Piper, with her mouth agape, was snoring and drooling, as usual. Above him, the sky was a canopy of brilliant starstuff. The Milky Way painted a brilliant stripe across the sky. In the distance, the wind was still blowing over the hollow pipes of the Ancients, like ghosts blowing on bottles.
His father was the one keeping the watch. Colin Walsh sat up on Emma’s carriage with his rifle across his lap. He nodded to Graeme when he saw him sit up.
Graeme crawled out of his bedroll and rubbed at his arms. Cold tonight, which wasn’t a surprise, considering how clear it was. He threw his duster and hat on, picked up his gunbelt, and climbed up to sit beside his father. “What time is it?” he asked in a low voice.
The elder Slinger glanced at his pocket-watch. “’Bout half past one.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up for my watch?” He should have started half an hour ago!
“Way you was sleepin’, reckoned you’d be up soon enough.” He drew out his cheroots and passed one to Graeme without a word.
Graeme hopped down to light a stick from the low-burning embers of their campfire, then brought it up so they could light the little rough-rolled cigars.
“You’re too young to smoke,” growled his father, gazing off at something in the distance while he puffed. Graeme didn’t say a word. Should he put it out? But then his father sighed. “You’re too dang young to be a Slinger too. But you are, so what can I say?” He passed the flaming stick to Graeme.
“You could say you’d rather I didn’t.” He got a good smoulder going, carefully keeping one eye closed to preserve his night vision, and shook the kindling out.
“You’re makin’ adult decisions now. I got no right to tell a grown man he shouldn’t smoke. “Specially when I do.” They sat together in companionable silence for a while, and the tips of their cheroots winked like glowing eyes in the dark.
“I didn’t want to kill those men,” he told his father after a long silence.
His dad sighed. “I know, son. I’m sorry you had to. Now that you have, was it what you expected?”
“No.” He fell silent and gazed out into the glowing night. Strange contrast, that. The night sky always made him feel peaceful, but that drone was getting on his nerves.
“How did it feel?”
Graeme shrugged. He wasn’t sure. “I was sick,” he said. “But I was excited too.” Maybe his father had an answer. “Dad, just what makes us different from the Desperados?”
The elder Walsh chuckled. “Nothin’, son. Just our choices.”
Check out The Vigil (Wyrd West Chronicles #3) and the rest of the Wyrd West Chronicles by Diane Morrison.
I think I’d like a library named after me. I think reading is the most important skill we can possibly learn. They tend to save that for Presidents and the like, though, so my hopes aren’t high!
I guess that depends on your definition of “common technology.” If you mean “commonly understood,” then I’d have to say that nuclear tech still wins hands down. Nothing else yet that we know of could destroy everything in a single, horrible moment. Even superbugs have medicines usually. But if we’re talking about “commonly used technology,” I’m going for the cell phone. We have already raised an entire generation with social anxiety because they don’t know how to talk to each other in person, and online discourse encourages and rewards a lot of negative behaviours, such as rudeness, and “siloing,” in that we can choose to limit our discourse to people that we already agree with. I used to work as a taxi dispatcher, and it was a soul-killing job. People were horrible to me on the phone. But then I started riding around in my hubby’s taxi, and meeting the people face-to-face who were nasty to me, and they stopped being nasty, simply because putting a human face to a voice makes it harder to be cruel. But I hesitate to call any technology “harmful.” It’s really all in how it’s used. For example, writing is so much easier with the internet, and cell phones put all that at our fingertips any time we like. And nuclear power is the most effective power source we currently have; though I’d advise we consider putting the power plants in space and harvesting their energy from there so that we can minimize their damaging potential.
That’s a good question. I would have to side with greater wisdom. Intelligent people often lack common sense, and this can make them do stupid things simply because they think that, rationally, humans should work that way, when in reality humans aren’t often rational. Take economics, for instance. Economists theorize about logical systems that never work because people just don’t act that way.
Diane Morrison lives with her partners in Vernon, BC, where she was born and raised. She likes pickles and bluegrass, and hates talking about herself. An avid National Novel Writing Month participant and gaming geek, she is proudly Canadian and proudly LGBTQ. Under her pen name “Sable Aradia” she is a successful Pagan author, a musician, and a professional blogger. After a lifetime of putting the needs of her family first, she is striking out to become what she always wanted to be; a speculative fiction writer. Follow her on Twitter or on her blog.
