The Case of Maddie Lawrence

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ? And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

The Case of Jorge Medeiros

A texting driver made a widower of Jorge Medeiros, and perhaps it’s not to far-fetched to say that it was the associations of text—words—with death that pushed him in the direction of faith in numbers. 

In any case, left with the care of his two elementary-school-aged children, Jorge’s indispensible aid became a book of random numbers, a souvenir from the middle of the last century that his wife had picked up at a yard sale as a curiosity.

He started out using it for household tasks: How long should he run the dryer for? Its serial number was 4214289, so he opened the book at random and ran his finger down the columns until he came to a number that began with 421. The next two digits were seven and six. Seventy-six minutes? Seventy-six seconds? Seven point six minutes? The dryer dial said “Max Dry” next to the 70, so he decided on seventy-six minutes. The clothes were very dry.

He used the number book to determine what temperature to set the oven to keep the pizza warm, how many rolls of wrapping paper to buy for the school’s fundraiser, and how much was an appropriate amount to spend when the kids were invited to birthday parties. The results were varyingly successful and disastrous: 512 (degrees Fahrenheit) resulted in thick black smoke, a visit from the fire department, and no pizza for dinner; 96 (rolls of wrapping paper) delighted the PTO at Linsey Elementary School.

An Ax Wight

Ax wights look like skinny six-year-olds, dressed all in dried leaves or cobwebs or bark or discarded plastic bags or bits of cloth. They may have belts made of bits of chrome or old reflective tape or broken mirrors. More salient than any of those details, though, is the giant AX they carry around. Ax wights hang around on forest paths. When hapless hikers come wandering by, an ax wight will ask them rapid-fire and random questions, such as “Do you like raccoons?” and “How far do those train tracks go?” and “Why is your hair that color?” and then, when they get bored—which takes on average no longer than 50 seconds—they slice the hiker down the middle with the ax.

You can forestall this, however, by carrying something shiny-sparkly in your pocket. As soon as you see the ax wight, give them the shiny-sparkly. They will drop the ax, take the shiny-sparkly, and sit right down, fascinated. You can make a getaway at that point. If you’ve got some forethought, you might want to take the ax with you, especially if you know you’re going to have to come back the same way. (Sometimes they may be so fascinated by what you give them that they’re still looking at it when you come back, but you probably don’t want to count on it.)

Here’s the shiny-sparkly I gave to the ax wight I ran into this morning.

(originally published at asakiyume.livejournal.com)

I saw the sun coming up this morning. A plane was making a temporary comet in the sky, too.

The windows of a sunrise-facing house were catching all that brilliance. And suddenly, the house was aflame—ignited by sunlight. The windows melted; everything within burned clean away—only the thinnest shell remained by the time the sun had cleared the tree line.

It’s a risk, when you build your house facing east. It’s why they tell you not to look at the rising sun, too. Otherwise, the same might happen to you—filled for a sunrise’s worth of time with flames, and then—just a shell, with the wind blowing through all your windows, your awestruck, parted lips.

(posted originally here) 

How You Become Trapped in Amber (Originally posted here)

Here is how it happens. You are wandering along, and you see a golden portal, with swirling, beautiful designs … You go closer to investigate, and it flows all around you. You’re astonished; you can think of nothing but designs, and gold, red-gold, and honey. The door behind you closes, and your world is now only gold, red-gold, and honey, but your mind is so taken up with the design, you may not even notice. Meanwhile that gold, red-gold, and honey is penetrating you, filling tear ducts and sweat glands and bronchioles and capillaries, sliding down neurons and nephrons, until you too are gold, red-gold, and honey, a treasure and a horror to be uncovered in future years, decades, centuries.

Story: The October Witch

Mountain ghost story for a chilly January morning, “The October Witch” 

Mountain road, night coming on, but Josh doesn’t slow down. He’s a good driver, used to all sorts of roads in all sorts of conditions. But the car, as if it has its own opinions on the road and the evening, slows to a gravelly stop.

The Night Crew

“That’s 1-800 Let’s-end-this-now, folks,” intoned Indigo.

The night crew at WLHV Public Radio were getting a little punchy. It was the ninth day of the fund drive, and they were running short of enticements to bring in donations. Not that much could induce pledges after 8:00 PM, but the skeleton crew of volunteers were committed through 9:00—Daniel Stein, a veteran of twenty years of fund drives, whose high forehead and white beard made him look like the icon of his Marxist politics; Karen Murakowski, a schoolteacher taking a year off to bond with her infant daughter, who nevertheless welcomed a few hours alone in the company of other adults; Phil (no last name given), currently in residence at the Sixth Street Shelter, who one might suspect came for the donated food and the free coffee, but who was surprisingly personable over the phone and wrote donors’ names and messages in a legible hand—a treasured quality; Adam Jackson, in the Aperture Science T-shirt, whose grad work involved tracking the spread of the ash borer beetle; and Sophia Williams, from the School of Pharmacy, who’d volunteered for the first time last fund drive and who this time had brought along her roommate, Glendaliz Rivera. Overseeing this lot, and providing the on-air patter, were Indigo Marshall, who hosted the weekend roots music program, Gary Castiglione, control room operator extraordinaire, and Asmita Rao, one of the morning hosts.

To spur more involvement from whatever diehard station faithful were listening despite the absence of regular programming, Indigo and Gary had hit upon the idea of inventing limericks to celebrate popular programs and inviting listeners to send in their own—with a pledge—to be read on air.

Sometimes touching and sometimes ironic

This American Life is iconic

Ira Glass’s delivery

Leaves his audience quivery

The listening urge becomes chronic

That was their latest effort. So far, the comments accompanying the few pledges that had come in hadn’t risen to the challenge, however. They’d been of the ordinary sort—words of encouragement, support for particular programs, and the occasional political view or plug for a local business, including one mysterious one for the Eastwood Home for Muddled Children.

“ ‘Muddled Children’? It must be a joke,” Asmita had said.

“Maybe it was actually ‘Muggle Children,’” Gary had suggested. “Maybe they’re Harry Potter fans.”

But Daniel, who had taken the pledge, insisted the caller had said “muddled.”

“We still have three dinners for two at Chez Antoine available, for pledges of $100 or more,” Indigo was saying.

“Though donations of any amount are welcome,” put in Asmita. “Ten, twenty, fifty dollars—”

“Two hundred fifty dollars,” added Gary. “Or two thousand fifty, if you happen to have that lying around.”

It didn’t hurt to ask.

Two phones rang; David and Karen got to work.

“Here’s one from the Internet,” said Asmita, handing Indigo the printout, “and it comes with a … not a limerick. It looks like a rap?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, sisters and brothers, Tango Ten from Springfield says …” Indigo cleared his throat and then, with an attempt at rhythm, read

this call goes out to the queen

of the Wildside Diner

aint none finer

girl I’m waitin’ for you

I’m here creatin’ for you

why you hesitatin’

I ain’t overstatin’

my devotion

you’re my love potion

come to my side

wanna make you my bride

true love is implied.

"

The Case of Tilly Mahan

Tilly Mahan collects angel skeletons, and she is happy to show them to anyone who asks. The problem—as religious authorities, newspaper reporters, and local children have discovered—is that Tilly’s conception of angels and skeletons differs from most people’s.

Her collection includes the following:

a plaster cast of a tire rut, taken from a not-yet-paved road in a stalled housing development

three charred fragments from a lightning-struck white pine

an old-fashioned brass key whose wards do, it must be said, resemble angel wings

a plastic soprano recorder with a crack in its head joint

a fringed suede moccasin, worn through at the sole, but with a jingle-bell sewed at the back

an unused bittersweet-orange zipper, 20 inches long, still in its packaging

a railroad spike with a glisten of snail trail across it

You get the idea. No photos of snow angels, no boxes of angel food cake mix, no swan feathers or anything like that.

You may be imagining Tilly Mahan as a dotty old lady, living alone, or maybe with a cat or two, or a saluki or two. Maybe in a tumbledown cottage by a fen. But in fact, she lives above Ernie & Bert’s Pizza, and she’s only thirty-two. It’s true she lives alone, but she doesn’t seem particularly dotty. She’ll talk to you in a very ordinary way about finding the various skeletons; it’s only if you question the word skeleton itself, or the word angel, that she stops talking and just stares at you. Just stares, as if from the other side of a chasm that once a bridge spanned.

"

“The Case of Tilly Mahan,” Asakiyume mita. (Livejournal)

Podcast: The Yew's Embrace →

We could still see the old king’s blood in the cracks in the flagstones beneath the new king’s feet when he announced to us all that this was a unification, not a conquest, and that we had nothing to fear from the soldiers that fenced us round. The new king said that my sister the queen would become his wife and that he’d make the old king’s baby son his very own heir. That’s how much he loved and honored our people, he said…

low res thoughts: Notes on the five stages of sleep and how they could affect gameplay.... →

lowresthoughts:

Notes on the five stages of sleep and how they could affect gameplay. Early ideas and research! (for colab project “In The Reverie”)

STAGE 1 - THETA WAVES

• Drowsy.
• Sudden twitches, falling sensation.
• Some loss of conciousness and awareness of external environment.
• Loss of self.

-…

Fascinating in so many ways—not least the term “sleep spindles,” which is cool.