You never knew your birth parents, growing up across the country in orphanages. While alone you learned to cook and shared your meals across the world, eventually owning your own business. One day you suddenly find out what your parents were. They were Fae… you’ve fed thousands Fae Food.

The call from your New York restaurant comes at 2am their time which is a sensible 11pm your time.

“Boss, we need you,” the manager says. Hercules – the name he chose for himself when he first started working for you – doesn’t scare easily. He can’t, not while running three of your restaurants in the cesspool that is New York city. “Someone just drove a truck through the flagship.”

You’re already out of bed and out the door. “I’ll be there before the sun comes up.”

Hercules’ relief bleeds through the phone. “Thank you.”

“You’re my right arm, Hercules,” you say. You’re wearing the plaid pajama set Mercedes, your left arm and the woman who runs your LA restaurants, gave you for your birthday. You can buy clothes in New York. “Thank you.”

Your Thank yous are far and few between. They’ve always felt awkward in your mouth and worse leaving it. But Hercules is one of yours and it’s easy to volley the words back, to not accept his gratitude in the face of his loyalty. No thanks needed. You’re part of me.

Hercules swallows hard. He knows you well. “Boss.”

“Hercules.”

You hang up at the same time.

Los Angeles is still awake as you roar onto the streets. Your motorcycle is the same one you bought when your first restaurant started turning a profit. Prodigal. The name of it is carved into the body. The streets are damp from a rare spot of rain. You’d gotten caught in it while leaving Queen earlier. It had felt like a bad omen then and your lip curls as the moisture sprays up under your tires now.

You should always listen to your gut.

Wait a minute if elves take a hundred years to grow up that has some weird implications.

So… if we say a human comes of age in fantasy worlds at 16, that means it takes an elf 6.25 years to age one human year. If we say the age of maturity is 18 that’s 5.55 years.

So then… okay with people that live a long time have to see their human friends die and probably see them like pets yeah that’s been explored to death. But what about a human just seeing their friend not grow up?

An elf toddler and a human toddler become friends at a playdate. At the time the human is two and the elf is 13. Emotionally the elf is just a little older than the human. But then the human grows up. He grows up and as he grows up his friend doesn’t. Not much, anyways.

She’s still sucking her thumb and throwing tantrums the entire time that he grows up. When he reaches the age where he’d choose a trade or go to an academy he’s earning extra money by babysitting her. During his initiation into adulthood on his 18th birthday she’s there with her parents holding a stuffed animal. Later that afternoon he sees her being shown some colorful flashcards with letters of the elvish alphabet on it by her father.

The human gets older. He learns how to fight, he goes from town to town getting work. At some point he joins the army. Every time he visits his hometown he has at least one more scar and by the time he’s 30 and the elf girl is mentally seven by human standards she starts to understand that something is wrong. Even after he settles down to be a home maker for the local blacksmith something feels wrong.

And she watches him grow old. When she’s in her 80s she babysits his grandchildren for extra cash after school, coming over in her school robes and ruffling his hair. She doesn’t remember why she became friends with this human or when but a strange sense of jealousy fills her heart.

Now she realizes it. She realizes it too late, on the day her friend learns that he is dying. The first day of her 100th year and the start of his last. Humans’ lifetimes may only last for the childhood of an elf if they’re lucky, but they learn so fast. They do so much. They cram their days full of love and hate and learning and wonder.

He knew this was coming. He knew all of this decades before she did, because elves are slow. Not stupid, certainly not stupid, but very very slow. She holds her old friend’s hand as he lays down on his bed. A man that has led such an ordinary life but feels so extraordinary to her. Because he has always, always been there and now he just won’t. Because in her eyes he became so wise so fast and now he’s just gonna be gone.

On an elf’s 100th birthday they are allowed to choose a new name for themselves. It can be important, or not. Usually it will follow them until the end of time. She stands in front of her family’s elders and is asked what name she will be called from now on.

She names herself after him.

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

!.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.

Seriously, wow.

I often hear how Tumblr is a hellsite, but this is the main reason I love it - when things like this randomly cross my dash.

You throw your rent bill across the room in frustration, and it lands under your bed. A few seconds later, a claw pushes the bill back out with a wad of cash.

Monster under the bed finally paying his fucking rent.

A Genie offers you one wish, and you modestly wish to have a very productive 2017. The genie misunderstands, and for the rest of your life, every 20:17 you become impossibly productive for just 60 seconds.

“Well, it was a nice day.” You kiss your sweetheart gently on the forehead and sigh as the last remaining seconds of 20:16 tick away. “See you at 8:18,” you say. 

Then it happens. Every ounce of fatigue or hunger leaves your body. The face of your beloved is perfectly still, their expression exactly the same. The ticking of the clock on the wall has stopped. Once again, it’s 20:17. 

You stretch your arms and walk to the table with the homework for the three doctorates you’re working on. The work is mentally stimulating and enjoyable, but it’s finished far too quickly. You check your pocket watch and see that not even one hundredth of a second has passed. 

You knew it was too soon to be able to see any movement on the watch, but you can never quite help yourself from looking early on every 20:17. Time to move on. 

You clean your home, do your budget, then go outside and fix a noise that your car was making earlier that afternoon. (Oh how you already miss afternoons.) Then you go back inside, boot up your computer (which magically speeds up to keep pace with you as long as you’re in contact with it) and check for any new orders. 

You’ve set up a website for the small business you started called “Magic Elf Services.” People in your area can pay a modest fee on your site to have different tasks and odd jobs done by “The Magic Elf” at 8:17pm every day. It was a little slow to get started, but word has spread and these days you have a steady stream of clients. 

The money that comes in from the business is nice, but you’re mostly grateful that it gives you a clear list of things to do. You print off your updated list of clients, step outside, and start making your way through the neighborhood with your to-do list. 

There’s the apartments down your street where several neighbors have hired you to tidy up, do the dishes, and mop the floors. You do the windows too, just to see if they notice. There’s the large house across town that paid the “Magic Elf” to clean out the gutters. After the first dozen jobs are done, you manage to stop looking at your pocket watch. 

As near as you’ve been able to determine in the past, 20:17 seems to last for approximately one normal year. But it’s not exact. For one thing, it’s hard to keep track of “time” when everything but you has crawled to an almost total standstill. For another thing, time seems to move differently depending on how “productive” your behavior is. One time you tried to spend all of 20:17 sitting at home in your pajamas, but that was getting you nowhere, so you eventually gave up and got busy. (Though you defiantly stayed in your pajamas the whole time.) 

During 20:17 your body doesn’t get tired, hungry, sick, or injured. You’re essentially tireless and immortal for the duration of the “minute.” So sleeping or eating away your boredom has never really worked for you. 

One of the houses on your list forgot to follow the instructions and leave a key for you to get in. At first you figure you’ll just send them an email telling them to pay more attention and that you’ll do the job tomorrow. Then you decide to go home, get your locksmith tools, and come back. 

After finishing up all the jobs on your list, you go into several other homes and small businesses in the area, performing tasks you hope they’ll find helpful, and leaving a hand-painted business card at each one. (The business cards don’t contain your real name just in case somebody thinks “The Magic Elf” should be subject to breaking and entering laws.) 

Speaking of laws, you head down to the local police station to pick up your case file. You’ve been in contact with a detective who’s been investigating corruption within their department, and your ability to investigate unseen and get in almost anywhere between the ticks of the clock has proven invaluable. You see that they’ve also added five missing person cases to your file this evening, which certainly raises your interest in the job. 

You make your way through town gathering evidence, and start making your way to the outskirts of town. Since you happen to be out that way (and you’ve already solved three of the five missing person cases) you decide to swing by the stone castle you’re building and do some more work there. 

The castle walls stand about 20 feet right now, but you know they’ll be much higher when you’re done. You’re far from any roads and pretty safely tucked away, so for now it’s your little secret. You’ve been excavating and moving all the rock yourself, which has been much easier than you first expected since your body doesn’t get tired or sore. You’ve also got a nice system of tunnels going underneath the castle, and you dig and build more of that network for a while. 

All that time spent underground has left you feeling rather lonely, so you walk back home to see the face of your sweetheart. Their facial expression has moved ever so slightly since you last saw them, which is a comfort to you. Looking at them gets your imagination going and makes you dream up a story you’d like to tell, so you sit on your couch, plug in your laptop, and write a book. 

After you finish editing the last chapter for the third time, you finally allow yourself to look at your pocket watch again. Three seconds have officially passed so far. 

It’s gonna be a long 20:17. 

Wow, Dave. You managed to take a concept that seems nice on the exterior and make it into a real nightmare. This is some good stuff.

Which is EXACTLY why you should never trust a wish-granting djinn. 

You have been accepted into a school for supernatural creatures. You decide to let your teachers and classmates try to figure out what you are.

Someone puts blood in your orange juice, no doubt hoping to trigger fangs or claws. You know that the vampires often take their meals this way, that they don’t speak until after the meal is done for fear of lisping, but you’re not a vampire. 

“It’s not that I can’t drink blood,” you tell your friends, pushing the juice away from you. “It’s just that–well, where did this blood even come from? It might not be clean.”

“Hey,” Amanda says, offended. Her glittery wings twitch behind her and the delicate feathers that serve as her eyebrows furrow. “That’s my blood you’re talking about.”

You grimace and push the glass towards her. “You should hold onto it then. i think chemistry is moving onto blood studies next and you do not want that getting to them.”

Amanda’s strange, light green eyes gleam for a second. In the next moment, the glass is empty, no trace of blood or juice. As one of the fae, she has access to dimensions the rest of them could only dream of. As far as you’re concerned, that glass of blood no longer exists.

Sam groans and slumps forward, his scales scraping against the table. He looks human but, you know, it’s only a glamour. Underneath, Sam is just as inhuman as Amanda, maybe even more so. Were-lizards are an odd bunch. “Come on! If you tell us I promise to split the money with you!”

“Well, I don’t,” Lexi says. She’s reading over the history notes from yesterday, long dark hair falling around the heavy frames of her prescription sunglasses. You know that she’s going to have to join the night classes soon if her vampiric powers get any stronger. You’ll miss her but you’ve never been a fan of the smell of burning flesh so you’d rather she switch classes sooner rather than later. “I plan to collect in full when I finally figure it out.”

Keep reading

writing-prompt-s:

when we meet, i’m older but born after her, which is confusing. she was immortal somewhere after the 3rd century, we’re not sure. something about an ancient ritual. a sacrifice. she was twenty. if she ages, it’s nowhere i can see. the cut on her ribs from the ritual never heals. she is constantly annoyed by it.

we met in a meadow, by chance, when i got lost after woodstock. she looked at me with these odd eyes as i stumbled out of the loop, still smelling of sweat and other things. for a long time we stared at each other, she in her peasant clothes, me in tattered peace signs. and then she laughed.

she meets me in london during jack the ripper’s reign. we get tea. i tell her about the future where women are rulers and she snorts. i tell her about medicine. she tells me about witchcraft. i tell her about spaceships. she tells me about books that will die before i get to read them. when she laughs my heart feels funny. i think it’s the death on the wind.

she meets me by the berlin wall. we break it down together. she dances her bare feet in the dust. when she laughs something very small breaks in me. i miss my twenty-third birthday by accidentally going back to the dinosaurs. when i find her in the twenty-second century she’s holding a cake for me, telling me she’d found the signs of my travels somewhere back in twenty fifty-three. we sit on a rooftop and look at the stars and eat cake. i save her a slice. when i go back in time, i find her crying. i don’t tell her how i knew. there is something really beautiful in watching someone break into a smile when they’ve been sobbing.

i don’t know what happens. i stop jumping so much. we’re not supposed to. we’re not meant for long stays, we’ll change fate. just in and out. but hours turn into days. we spend a week in paris in her apartment over the city and i’m silly drunk when she leans over to me. 

kissing her stops time. kissing her stops everything. 

she waits for the future where we are legally allowed to be together. in the meantime i find her in dark corners. she laughs when i get tangled in my own skirts. she shows me a different world. a place where i stay. she knows i have to go. but i can’t help wish i could stay.

time isn’t real. that’s the thing. we experience it only based on our own perception of events. i only realize what’s happening because i stay too long. we are skinny dipping in a cold ocean the first time i notice it. she says something wrong. it’s not a bad mistake. but she doesn’t seem to remember how we got here for a moment. and then, in a flash, it’s gone. we are hiking through the amazon the first time she starts screaming. it’s been a long history. there’s just too much. she has periods of lucidity followed by eons of confusion. everything for her flashes by in an instant. she can’t remember what’s already been invented or what are stories i’ve told. her language is slipping. 

i hold her in a future where she is shaking. i kiss her neck. she smells like summer. “i’m losing myself in it,” she whispers. her skin is still bleeding. “i’m losing it.” i don’t know what to say. infinity is a long time to wait. she experiences time in flashes, sees a hundred years at a glance. and me? i show up and evaporate before she even recognizes me.

if she is mad, i am just as bad. i travel too much to find how to stop this. into parallel universes. outside of the ages. i don’t sleep and i don’t eat and the whole time i hear her screaming. 

it comes to me while i am sitting in the library of alexandria. time isn’t real. if i break the law, time could unravel. i think of her. if it’s worth it. what happens if i’m caught. we aren’t supposed to do things like this. even if we’re in love. 

but i am in love. i am in love.

i open the loop. i could ruin everything. but there she is, crying on the night she will be taken. and my heart breaks. it’s simple. the only way to undo it without leading to ruin is to make sure it never happens in the first place. i take her hand and i give her my loop. she has all of time to explore now. i’ve already seen it. i take her place. 

it is many years later. we meet in a meadow and she laughs.

This is beautiful.

Years ago, you promised your firstborn to a witch. Since then, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to get laid. The witch is starting to get pretty pissed.

Y’all get together to discuss your options and she starts coaching you on how to get men because she doesn’t want to waste more magic on you without promise of payment. The more time you guys spend together the more you realize you have a bit of a crush on her. Soon you’re sabotaging your dates on purpose to see her again. 

Long story short you fall in love and get married and do the sperm donor thing AND YOUR FIRSTBORN IS HERS BY DEFAULT and you live happily ever after. The end.

This Strange Way of Dying (2013)

“Spanning a variety of genres—fantasy, science fiction, horror—and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational. 

This speculative fiction compilation, lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human. Perplexing and absorbing, the stories lift the veil of reality to expose the realms of what lies beyond with creatures that shed their skin and roam the night, vampires in Mexico City that struggle with disenchantment, an apocalypse with giant penguins, legends of magic scorpions, and tales of a ceiba tree surrounded by human skulls.”

By Silvia Moreno Garcia, cover by Sara K. Diesel

Get it  now here and leave a review if you can. 

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