Trunk Stories

A Lady Scorned

prompt: Write about someone whose luck is running out.

available at Reedsy

She clapped her leathery wings in rage, her eyes glowing like hot coals. Her champion had not only let her down, he’d flat-out betrayed her. As usual, only her favorite brother was here to comfort her.

“Relax, sister.” Pride placed his arm and one wing around her. “You knew there was a chance to lose, and you took it.”

“Yeah, sure. You can puff yourself up with ‘at least I tried’ but that doesn’t cut it for me; I have to win.”

Pride stood, holding his sister close. “There will be others,” he said.

“He was to be my champion. I thought he was steadfast in his devotion to me.”

“You’re my favorite sister, but I never understood why you chose him in the first place. Born to an addicted mother living in a hovel, with an alcoholic father serving a life sentence.”

“Exactly. And on his first birthday?” She looked at her brother and saw no response. “Do you remember what happened on his first birthday?”

“His mother ODed in her car in the convenience store parking lot, he was in the back seat.”

“Right, but an off-duty police officer happened to be there. One whose brother and sister-in-law were in a uniquely perfect position to take in a child.”

“Because they’d just found out she was barren, right?” Pride raised an eyebrow and pulled her close. “I try to tell people, of all my siblings, Luck is the coldest, but they never believe me. Anyhow, carry on.”

“Right. Well, they were ready to take in and care for a special-needs child; child of a junkie mother and father in jail and all. He was undersize and underweight, but that’s because I was slowing his brain development.”

“What? Why?” Pride released his sister and stepped back.

“He was genetically gifted, but without the proper environment, he’d never reach his full potential. I held him back until he had that environment.”

Luck took a deep breath and let the fire in her eyes calm. “I made sure he had everything he needed: good schools, healthy food, loving parents. I even helped his adoptive father get elected to congress in order to get him to an even better school and ensure his acceptance to MIT at fifteen.”

“And all that time he remained your champion?”

“Always. He attributed his situation and success to me. ‘Luck has been kind to me,’ he’d say.”

“What changed?”

“Dear brother, I don’t know how, but your influence found him. I know you kept your part of the deal and never touched him directly, but….” She let out a heavy sigh and settled into a squat position, elbows on her knees, face on her hands, wings behind her like a gargoyle on a parapet.

“What is it?” Pride asked.

“Why is it easier for the brothers than the sisters? You, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, all of you. You influence someone a certain way and you gain power. It’s not the same for me and my sisters.”

“Except Love,” he said.

“It seems that way, but she is outright worshipped by millions. No, we need belief…not just influence. Me, Chaos, Order, Fate, Wisdom…well, she does a little better than the rest of us, but of the sisters, only Love truly prospers.”

“Tell me what happened with your champion?” Pride asked. “The one you bet Sloth a hundred years servitude would acknowledge you in an influential speech.”

“He finished out his PhD in Neuroscience, with his thesis, The Role of Ventromedial Pre-Frontal Cortex Excitation in Unconscious Bias and Apophenia. The more he researched, the more he became convinced that his luck was a story he told himself to make sense of accomplishments he didn’t feel deserving of.

“After everything I did for him, everything for which he thanked me and praised me for years, he had the gall to denounce me in the footnotes of his paper. ‘Despite the lies I told myself, there is no such thing as luck. Every accomplishment I’ve made is a combination of my own efforts and my environment. There is no luck, just random, sometimes cruel, chance, as seen through the lens of our own biases. Our own actions determine our luck.’”

Pride crouched down next to his sister. “Oof. He gave the credit to himself and Chaos.”

Hot tears streamed down her face. “He did, but he’s about to find out that I’m a lot crueler than my sister. She plays fair; everyone is treated the same and the outcome is equally unsure. Not me.” Luck took a deep breath and rose to her feet, spreading her wings, electricity building in arcs around her.

Pride stood and stepped away from her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m giving every bit of energy he gave me back.” Her eyes were black pits and lightning arced between her teeth as she let out a pained scream.

The mass expulsion of power brought all the siblings to her side. The lives of individual mortals were rarely of any consideration, but this one had to be special to elicit such a response from their usually cold sister.

“What now?” Pride asked.

“We watch and wait…see if he ever comes back to my side.” Luck smiled but it was a mirthless, icy thing. “Even believing in bad luck is believing in me.”

The siblings watched as the man who had lived a charmed life faced a change in circumstance. His fiancé left him stranded at the altar, leading him to drinks with his closest friend.

It was the first time he’d ever gotten drunk, and as gifted as he was genetically, he was just as cursed with a proclivity to addiction. It took months, but he entered a downward spiral. Alcohol took his job, then his possessions, then his home.

Even as he ended up sleeping under a bridge because he couldn’t be bothered to stay sober long enough to sleep in the shelter, he continued to attribute everything to himself. He knew that he had a high likelihood of addictive tendencies, yet he allowed himself to repeatedly drink until he was drunk to dull the pain of rejection.

His clothes wore thin, and he warmed himself by a barrel of burning garbage. An early winter storm had come in mid-autumn and marked the beginning of a brutal winter. There were no warm places left to sleep.

The people he considered his “friends,” the ones that helped keep him drunk, had sobered enough to get into the shelter, filling it to capacity. There were a few people still sleeping in tents with warm sleeping bags, but they wouldn’t allow him anywhere near them. He didn’t blame them. He clung to the belief that everything that happened to him, good and bad, was a direct result of his own choices.

The winter remained harsh, and his body began to show signs of failing. Thanks to not having anywhere left to panhandle, he had been sober for nearly a week when he built himself a nest under a bridge.

As he lay there shivering, he came to the realization that he had wasted his life. He hadn’t published anything since his doctoral thesis. He’d barely begun working in his field when he let himself be taken down by one negative event.

“It’s not all my fault,” he said to the bridge above him. “Sure, the drinking, or at least the starting drinking. I need to get help. But what started it all?”

He curled into a ball, still shivering. “She got cold feet at the worst possible time, but I didn’t do that. Now I’m shivering, probably hypothermia, I’ll be dead by morning. I used to have such good luck, right up until I decided there was no such thing. I guess my luck now is to freeze to death. You’re a bitch, Lady Luck, even if I deserve it.”

She folded her wings, the electrical crackling around her fading to nothing. Her eyes brightened and her stance relaxed. She looked around to see that only Pride remained by her side, her other siblings having grown weary of her tantrum. “He’s back,” she said.

“Not for long,” Pride said.

Luck twitched a finger, and a patrol officer turned on her search light and pointed it under the bridge on a whim, illuminating his huddled form. “Fate says as long as I intervene, he’s got years,” she said, “but he has no more chances with me. Any day he doesn’t acknowledge my presence, I won’t be there. If he ever betrays me again, I’ll end him then and there.”

“You’re my favorite sibling,” Pride said, “I just hope that I remain yours.”

Trunk Stories

Achievable

prompt: Start your story with someone making a vision board.

available at Reedsy

Matthew was certain this arts and crafts project was a waste of his time and patience, but he’d promised the doctor. Things I want for my life, things I can work toward, things I can achieve in the coming year, he thought.

It took long hours searching the web, finding just the right images, printing them out on the color printer, and stuffing them in his backpack before anyone could see. The library wasn’t the ideal place for this, but it had to do. He wasn’t about to spend a bunch of money he didn’t have on magazines just to cut out the pictures.

The library was closing. Matthew shut down the computer he’d been working at and walked across the street to the crafts store. There he picked up a piece of poster board, a pair of scissors, and some glue. On a whim, he picked up some paper letters he could use to add “inspirational words” to his board as the doctor had said.

Backpack in place and poster board under his arm, Matthew took the bus home. He rode with the city’s outcasts to his own gutter of a neighborhood where the filth and stench threatened to choke him.

He didn’t mind the fifth-floor walk-up; a little exercise was good for the body and soul. There were plenty of things that others in the building complained about, but they didn’t bother Matthew in the least. The rats and cockroaches were just following their biological imperatives, the boiler going out on occasion didn’t matter if you always took cold showers and had extra blankets, and the water tasted bad, but that’s to be expected in the city.

What the complainers in the building ignored, what bothered Matthew most, was the never-ending miasma. It was a roiling, fuming blend of rotting garbage, the constant use of the alley as a pissoir, and the unwashed bodies that went about their business as though they didn’t reek or tried to cover it up with cloying perfumes and “deodorants.”

He took a cold shower, scrubbing the stench of the city off every inch of his person with a clean washcloth and the lye bar soap from the hardware store down the next block. He scrubbed until his entire body was pink and the only thing he could smell was the chlorinated water.

Matthew dried with a clean towel and placed it with the washcloth and his dirty clothes in the apartment-sized over-under washer dryer in the kitchen and started the load.

Dressed in a clean outfit identical to the one he’d been wearing, he spread out his materials for the “vision board.” He began cutting out the printed images; a bit from here, a bit from there, and another bit from somewhere else. As he worked, he felt the turmoil in his brain settle.

Words came to him unbidden: clean, pure, proper. He worked into the wee hours of the morning arranging the images and words until it spoke to him, moved him.

“You might be right, doc,” he said, “this does help me put things in order.” As he said it, he glued the picture of her face in the center of his collage.

He looked through the images he’d printed but hadn’t used. They interested him, sure, but not like the ones on the board. He’d discard of them in the paper recycling bin in the morning.

Matthew removed his shoes and placed them where he could get them on in a hurry if there was an emergency. Always prepared for the worst, he laid down on his bed fully dressed and pulled a blanket over himself. One would do, as the boiler was working.

He woke with the rising of the sun and began his morning routine. He folded the blanket and laid it at the foot of the bed, then laid out another set of clothes on top of the blanket. He stripped and threw the clothes in the washing machine, pulling the previous day’s wash out of the dryer. He folded the clothes and put them in his single drawer; two pairs of black jeans, two plain, black tee-shirts, two pairs of black socks, two pairs of black boxers, one black hoody. The towels and wash cloths he folded and placed neatly on the shelf in the washroom.

Matthew took his morning shower, again scrubbing himself pink until chlorine was all he could smell. The morning’s washcloth and towel went into the washer with the clothes.

He dressed in the clothes he’d laid out and grabbed the duffel bag from his closet. He had some shopping to do today, but it wouldn’t fit in his backpack. He checked the time; the hardware store didn’t open for another hour.

He sat at the small table where he’d put together his masterpiece and opened a “meal replacement” bar. It has everything I need, so why is it called a “replacement” rather than just a meal, he wondered. Matthew ate with careful bites, setting it down on the spread-out wrapper and chewing thoroughly before swallowing.

When he’d finished his regular, bland, morning meal, he folded the wrapper into a neat square and laid it atop the stack of unused images and scraps from cutting out the other images.

Matthew rolled the vision board into a tube shape, careful not to damage it, and placed it in the duffel. That done, he sat at the table in silence until it was time to leave.

He slung the duffel over his shoulder, picked up the papers for recycling, and the plastic wrapper from his meal bar. It was the only plastic to be found in his apartment. He allowed it only because it was the only way to get the one thing he could stand to eat.

Matthew made his way down to the foyer, then headed to the back door. There, in the alley, were the bins for recycling and garbage. He placed the papers in the recycling bin, then held his breath to open the garbage bin and throw away the little square of plastic.

As soon as the lid banged shut, he ran back into the foyer and didn’t exhale or take a breath until he’d gone all the way through and out the front door. Still, it seemed as though he couldn’t get away from the stench.

He walked the nine minutes to the hardware store and stood in front of the door for four minutes until they opened. The cashier that opened up knew that he wasn’t a talkative sort, and she gave him a short nod which he returned.

He pushed a cart through the parts of the store he knew well first. Another bar of lye soap, a box of plain laundry detergent, a box of powdered bleach, and it was finally time to buy the gloves he’d looked at on every visit.

Matthew avoided the aisle with plastic bags and went to the tools section. He picked up the other items on his mental list, making sure they met his criteria of being comfortable to use and containing no plastic.

The items he wanted in the cart, there was one more aisle to peruse; the one he hated most. He took a deep breath and pushed the cart down the aisle of plastic bags. They ranged in size from “sandwich” to 33-gallon “leaf” bags. It was insane. As if there wasn’t enough plastic in the wild already, he saw single-use bags for a single serving of food, large ones to collect the small bags, and even larger ones to collect the large bags.

It was a roll of bags not stuffed into a box that caught his eye. The tag said they were compostable. Matthew knew the locations of at least fifty compostable garbage collection bins around the city, perhaps those would do.

He paid for his purchases with cash, and put them in his duffel, being careful not to damage his artwork. Outside the hardware store was one of the few remaining pay phones that still worked. He called the doctor at her home number to make sure she was there and let her know that this couldn’t wait.

He took the bus into the heart of the city and walked the six blocks to the doctor’s home. He walked around the building first, gathering his nerve to show her his artwork. In the alley, the smell of garbage and urine and unwashed bodies brought him back into the moment. It may be a more expensive gutter, but it’s still a gutter all the same. At least this alley had compost bins.

He walked through the foyer and headed for the stairs. Others may rely on an elevator to get them up and down, but he was one to not put himself where he could be trapped.

Eleven floors was a long way to go, but not so long as to tire him out. He walked through the quiet, carpeted hallway to her door, 11-G. Rather than ring the bell, he knocked. The fewer intermediaries between two people trying to communicate, the better.

She opened the door. “Come in, Matthew. I’m glad you called when you needed to talk, that’s something new. You should be proud of yourself.”

He entered and set the duffel down on the soft carpet. He opened the top and pulled out his rolled-up vision board. “You had to be the first to see this,” he said, “and you were right; it helped me organize my thoughts.”

“That’s excellent news, Matthew.”

“It took a lot of searching to find the right images,” he said, “especially ones where they weren’t blurry or whatever.”

“Why don’t you open it up for me and explain it?”

Matthew looked at the floor and cleared his throat. “I—uh—I’d rather that you open it up and look at it yourself, first. It’s the art piece I want to make.”

“Sure, Matthew. Why don’t you take a seat while I do that?”

She unrolled the poster board and gasped. “No, I—”

Matthew cut her off by grabbing her and throwing her to the floor. The thick carpets muffled the noise, and the walls blocked out her panicked screams.

It was harder to tie her hands and feet together with the rough hemp rope than he’d expected, but at least it wasn’t made with plastic like all the soft ropes. He stuffed her mouth with a rag he grabbed from the kitchen and tied it in place with another piece of rope. He cut off her clothes and removed his own. He’d expected her to have a washing machine, but she didn’t have one.

Instead, he tied her to an exposed beam in the living room and washed her clothes and his own in her tub and hung them to dry while she sobbed in the improvised gag. Her painfully annoying perfume washed out of the clothes, at least, but it permeated the apartment, seeming to even come from the carpet.

The clothes hung to dry, he untied her from the beam and dragged her to the bath where he scrubbed both of them pink with a washcloth and the lye soap until the smell of her perfume was gone. He felt clean for the first time since he’d opened the garbage can in the morning.

He stepped out of the tub and dried himself. She looked up at him, her hands and feet bound, her eyes pleading, and begged through the gag.

“Just hang on,” he said, “I’m going to put on those gloves and clean this nasty place until all the smells are gone and then complete the achievable goal on my vision board…today.”

He returned with the vision board and his other purchases from the hardware store; the natural rubber gloves, the bleach, a ball peen hammer — just in case —, a boning knife, and the roll of compostable bags. He left the board leaning against the wall with everything except the gloves and the bleach.

While he cleaned, scrubbing the apartment from ceiling to floor, the clothes dried, and the doctor’s cries weakened. When the only smell left in the apartment was that of chlorine, he returned to the bathroom.

“I’ll clean this room after I complete my art project. I mean, it’ll probably get pretty messy.”

He looked at the poster board and admired the collage of crime scene photos, each showing a different severed body part. Finding an image of every piece had taken him hours, while finding fourteen compost bins would be a breeze.

He pointed to the image of a left foot, severed at the ankle. “I want to start with this one. Start with the small goals first, right?”

Trunk Stories

My First Christmas

prompt: Write a story about a family (biological or found) coming together for Christmas.

available at Reedsy

I should’ve listened when the union rep told me I should wait for another navigator — any navigator — as long as they weren’t human. “Too much trouble,” they said. Noooo, I was in too much of a hurry and hired on the human.

It is important to me that I am good captain. To that end, I’ve accumulated a set of rules, guidelines, if you will, to keep me moving in that direction. I’ve written them all down in a tablet; sixty-eight rules so far.

Rule thirty-one: Allow the crew to express themselves when it does not interfere with the operation of the vessel or the morale of other crew members.

Now there were multicolored lights that served no purpose strung up through the passageways, decorations of giant ice crystals on the bulkheads, and one of a fat human in some sort of ceremonial garb on a bulkhead in the mess.

The human’s cabin had been piling up with small, brightly colored boxes. At every station she left with another of the crew to “go shopping” and would return with more stuff that got piled in her cabin. At the last station she’d been ecstatic to return with a replica Terran tree.

As soon as the human’s contract expired, I’d let her go and hire another navigator…even one fresh out of academy. Perhaps then, my life could return to some semblance of normal.

I absentmindedly groomed my mandibles with my forelimbs. Not exactly good manners, but I was never known for that.

“Hey, Cap, you alright?” the human asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that when you start grooming your mandibles it usually means you’re moody or thinking hard.” She turned toward me with her strange face. 

Humans were in that weird place between predator and prey, sharing features with both. When they looked right at you with their binocular vision, though, they felt like complete predator, tickling some long-forgotten part of my hindbrain.

“Navigator Katerina, what is the meaning of the lights and water ice crystals?”

“Cap, I told you before, just call me Kat. The lights and snowflakes and Santa are decorations for Christmas.”

“Nav—Kat, what is it? Some human thing, I assume. The way you’re hoarding in your cabin, I’d think it was a nesting display, but I haven’t read of any such thing with humans.” That gave me a disturbing thought and I did my best to keep my forelimbs and antennae from giving it away. “Is it a nesting display? Are you going into heat?”

“Why, Captain Hintoolia of the Creela, Hin — you don’t mind if I call you Hin? — I think you’ve embarrassed yourself.” She laughed. While it might be taken by some as a threat display, I knew it was a gesture of mirth.

She regained her composure and ran one of her fleshy hands across my shoulder cap carapace. “No, Hin, humans don’t have a season to go ‘in heat’ like some. I’m not hoarding, just storing presents away until Christmas.”

“Again, what is it?!” I’d just broken one of my rules for being a good captain.

Rule twelve: don’t raise your voice in anger or frustration.

She shrunk down in her seat. “Sorry, Captain.”

“No, no, I’m sorry, Kat. I shouldn’t have raised my voice.” I settled my wing carapaces and calmed myself. “Please tell me what Christmas is.”

“Christmas is a mid-winter festival,” she said. “It started out with pagans that worshipped the rebirth of the sun, got picked up by a few other religions, then a really popular religion picked up on it as the birth date of their messiah.

“From there, it turned into a more secular, commercial holiday. A decorated tree, like the pagans, a saint turned into a symbol of commerce, stuff like that. Mostly, it’s an excuse for everyone to gather in the dark of winter, eat too much, and exchange gifts.”

“A religious holiday, then?”

“For some. Not for me.”

“As the only human aboard, are you giving all those gifts to yourself?”

She straightened up and her face brightened. “No, silly. Those are everyone’s gifts. The rest of the crew are excited for it. I was going to loop you in at the next port. You’re the last one to join in.”

“Why would you want to celebrate a human midwinter festival on a ship where you’re the only human and there is no winter or summer or even days and nights?”

“Well, I’ve been on the crew for half a cycle, and everyone’s made me feel like part of the family. It just seemed right.” She placed her hand on my shoulder carapace again. “I’ll make you a deal: join us for this, and if you don’t like it, we’ll cancel the plans for the other holidays.”

“Other holidays?” I asked. I hated to admit it, but her fleshy hands felt good on my carapace; warm, smooth, and I could feel her heartbeat.

“We decided that we’d celebrate one holiday from everyone’s home world once a cycle. That’s currently seven holidays per cycle, unless we hire on someone from another world.”

I thought about it. The human hadn’t been nearly as disastrous as I’d been led to believe they were. She was a competent navigator, even finding us a path around a border skirmish that let us get to our destination on time with the fuel we had.

“Deal,” I said, holding out a manipulator for the human “handshake” gesture.

The next station we stopped at for refueling, she invited me to go shopping with her. The experience was at once unnerving and relaxing somehow, as she walked me through the hustle and bustle of the station’s shopping quarter. She pointed out trinkets and knickknacks, naming which crew member each was perfect for.

It was fun until she said, “You should decide who you want to give a gift to. Nobody is forced to participate, and no one will take it badly if you don’t get them something. But if there’s anyone you feel you should give a gift to, now’s the time to get it.”

That sounded fine and well, but I couldn’t, as a “good captain,” only give gifts to specific crew members.

Rule twenty-eight: Never allow favoritism to affect your actions or choices.

I would either need to get everyone a gift, or no one.

Rule sixty: Anything that improves morale without jeopardizing the ship or the mission is a Good Thing.

“Gifts for all it is,” I said. “But, um….”

Rule one: Never be afraid to admit mistakes.

Rule seven: Never hesitate to ask for help when you need it.

“Kat, I’m very sorry, but I wasn’t paying close attention when you were pointing out which items were a good choice for specific crew members. Could you…help me?”

Her face brightened. “Of course, Hin! Let’s do it!”

I worried that her sudden exuberance might cause an issue in the crowded shops. I needn’t have worried; she navigated them as though she had an innate sense of where the crowd would part and where it would compact. Maybe it was one of those mythical human powers I’d heard about. I decided I’d ask her about it another time.

We were finishing up at the last shop and she was so excited I thought her skeleton would jump out of its meat…or however that human saying goes. She’d found the “perfect” gloves for the engineer, a four-armed creature with six grasping digits on each manipulator that could move in ways that would make one think they didn’t have an endoskeleton.

After paying for the gloves, she bounced out of the shop to wait for me on the promenade. The shopkeeper totaled up my purchases and piled them into a disposable tote. “Humans, huh?” he asked.

I just clacked my mandibles once and caught up to her on the promenade. “We’re done, right?” I asked.

She pointed to a small shop. “One more stop,” she said. The shop had human goods; mugs shaped for human manipulators — although the size of some of them made me think that some humans must be gargantuan — shirts made for a body with two arms on level with the head opening, and a host of trinkets, gadgets, and snacks that I didn’t begin to comprehend.

We carried our goods in, and she walked up to a side counter and waved over a human working there. “We have a bunch of gift-wrapping to do.”

“No problem,” the human male said. “What’s the occasion?”

“We’re declaring it Christmas.”

“Nice! If you fill out those slips there and put each one with the item we’ll get ’em wrapped and tagged for you.”

She filled out the slips and laid out the gifts, fifteen in all, including the gloves for the engineer. How she could remember what gift went to which crew member was beyond me, but she did seem to have a sharp mind when she applied herself.

“I’ll ping your comm when these are ready,” the human male said.

“Sure,” Kat said, “let me give you my con—”

“Contact me, instead,” I said. “Most of these are my fault anyway.”

“You sure, Cap?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Can you check with the courier office and see if there are any priority packages we can pick up for Sigre-7 station? It’s not much, but a little extra cash doesn’t hurt.”

“Sure thing, Cap. When you’re done you can stow all that in my cabin. I don’t mind, since it’s just until the next jump. We’ll celebrate while we’re in the lane with nothing else to do.”

Navigator Katerina was not the only person capable of sneaky planning. I don’t know what got me so in the mood, but as soon as she left the shop, I caught the male’s attention.

“What would be a good gift for an adult human female, class one navigator?” I asked.

“Tell me some more about her,” he said, “and we’ll figure it out together.”

I left the packages on the pile in her cabin, save one that I hid in my own cabin. Something made me want to surprise her with it. I wasn’t sure whether it was a dominance thing or a predator thing or something else entirely.

True to her word, as soon as we jumped and were in the hyperlane, she set the small artificial tree on a table in the mess and piled the packages around it. She asked me to wait for everyone in the mess while she gathered them all.

On the way, I snuck the package out of my cabin and hid it at the bottom of the pile of packages. Just in time, too, as the entire crew piled in in a rush.

Kat entered, wearing a hat like the one in the picture of the fat human, and called out, “Merry Christmas!”

We all returned the greeting, curious about what would happen next.

She pulled a tray of snacks out of the galley, along with mild-intoxicant drinks. The snacks and drinks were all different for each species’ specific metabolism. Guessing by the sweet-grubs and prathjuice she supplied for myself and Loadmaster Misteel, they were all special occasion dishes and drinks.

“Now,” she said, “while we all sit around and get fat and happy, I’ll play Santa and pass out the presents.” With that, she began picking up the packages and delivering them to the person on the tag.

After she’d delivered three or four, she stopped and looked at us. “Well, go ahead and open them! Half the fun is discovering what you got!”

It soon turned into a frenzy of ripping open the brightly colored paper, being pleasantly surprised by the thoughtful gift, finding the tag, and thanking the one that provided the gift. Kat laughed and sang some silly song in a human language that was peppy and bouncy.

At Kat’s suggestion, I had gotten Engineer Gr’flktn a multi-tool with a knife that seemed to fascinate her to no end. Even as she opened other gifts, she kept manipulating the tool in one hand, opening a tool, feeling it, then closing it.

“Cut-proof gloves?!” Gr’flktn called out. “Kat! How did you know?”

Kat put an arm around her and pointed to the bandages on three of her digits. “I’m observant.”

It seemed as though every one of the crew bought me something. Some were decorations for my admittedly sparsely furnished cabin, some were treats from my home world, and one, from Kat, was an antique navigation calculator.

It was beat-up and of no use for modern navigation, but it was the same make and model as my brood-mother’s brood-mother had used so many cycles ago. It looked just like the one that sat on the shelf in my brood-mother’s home.

I turned it over, and there it was, the markings my ancestor had made on it when she received it brand new.

“How…how did you get this?” I asked.

Last time we were on Krola station, I called your brood-mother to find out what would be a good gift for you. She said she wanted to pass it on, and had it couriered to one of the stations on our route. So, I guess it’s really from your mom.”

“My brood-mother may have supplied it, but you were the one who thought to reach out to her to ask. And that was only a few ship-days after you boarded.”

“Well, you were willing to take a chance on a human, so I thought I would get you something that showed I appreciated it.” She went back to handing out the gifts until the only one left was the one I’d placed there.

There were murmurs and apologies from the crew for not getting her something, when she’d done so much for everyone. The general consensus was that they’d make it up to her next time.

“Really, don’t worry, guys. Everyone here has been so helpful. I told you, you didn’t have to get me anything, and I meant it. Giving gifts is the best part for me, anyway.”

There was a great deal of conversation going while she looked at the package. I got the feeling that she’d be getting special treatment from most of the crew for a while.

Finally, she opened the package, and her eyes began leaking liquid. I’d heard this was a bad thing. “I—I’m sorry,” I said, “if that made you—”

“No,” she cut me off, “there’s nothing to apologize for.” She lifted the tea mug with built-in strainer out of the box and showed everyone the picture of her as a child with her parents on the mug.

“I guess the guy at the gift store helped you find my socials,” she said, “but it’s just so thoughtful of you. It’s been ages, but I still miss them every day, and now they’ll always be by my side on the bridge. Thank you so much.”

Gr’flktn tested the cut-proof gloves with the very sharp blade of the multi-tool, then turned to me. “Captain, have you decided whether you’ll extend Kat’s contract, or are you still thinking it will be just the one cycle?”

Rule fifty-four: Good crew members are hard to find, so when you find one, sign them for as long as you can.

“I think we can negotiate a long-term contract with the union, if you are so inclined Kat? I mean, this is only my first Christmas, and I wouldn’t want to mess it up next cycle.”

Trunk Stories

A Simple Gesture

prompt: Write a story about two or more characters who don’t speak each other’s language (literally or metaphorically), but still find a way to communicate.

available at Reedsy

When she moved in, I knew nothing about her; even her species and sex was a question to me. Sure, there are a few non-humans on this back-washed mining planet — mostly running away from the law on their home worlds — but she wasn’t even one of the recognized member species of the Combine.

News of the war was always slow to arrive out here, but we all knew that it was going well for the Combine, not so well for the invaders. We knew them as the Skags, their proper name replaced even in serious news with the pejorative-sounding pronunciation.

The last news we had was that one of their colony worlds, home of one of their “client species” — known in the rest of the galaxy as slaves — had been liberated by Combine forces led by the Terran Union Navy and TU Marines.

She was small compared to most species of the Combine. Humans are short and compact, sure, as we come from a relatively high-gravity planet, but she was as short as me, at 150 centimeters. Despite that, she moved as though the gravity was in the perfect range for her.

I mean, I got used to it after a few months, but I don’t know how many times I banged my head on the ceiling trying to run. Moving gracefully in one-third gravity is something that takes practice for a human from Earth.

She was bipedal, with a long, slender, prehensile tail, and four long arms with four-fingered hands. Her legs and arms had one too many joints, but she moved as though she was made of water.

Her head was positioned somewhere between a straight-ahead gaze and an upturned gaze as a quadruped would have. She was covered in a rust-orange fur with a pale ridge of bristle running from between the dark spots above her eyes — which I would later learn were heat pits — to the back of her head, like a mohawk that was longest at the crest; about ten centimeters. Her eyes were bright yellow and round, with no sclera that I could discern.

Of course, having heard nothing of her species, I looked it up on the ’net. She was a klimarti from what the Combine knows as Haverun-Beta two. So far, little was known about their native language, but they also spoke a broken form of Skag due to being unable to voice many of the complex vowels of the language.

They were known to be primarily herbivorous but opportunistic omnivores, the males all displaying complex patterns of black and orange and the females being a solid color. When they had just begun to build cities, the Skag moved in and made them a “client species,” putting them to work in massive agriculture projects.

As the Combine had freed their planet and driven the Skags out, it was odd that she’d be here. There must be more to the story, but as there were no translations yet built for her kind, there would be no way to ask her.

Regardless, I thought she might feel isolated in a sea of aliens. That wouldn’t do. I would have to do something to let her know she wasn’t alone, and that she was welcome here, a simple gesture.

Sneak rubbed against my legs and let out a plaintive meow. I looked over and saw that his bowl was still half-full, but the bottom was visible in the middle. I picked up the bowl, put it on the counter and smoothed the food out with a spoon so the entire bottom was covered.

That seemed to placate him and gave me an idea as well. “Sneak, that’s a wonderful idea,” I said. With the information I had on their diet — at least as far as we knew — I had the perfect plan.

After a short trip to the market, I set about making a mess of my cramped kitchen. It wasn’t often I got to do things like this, even though it always put me in a good mood.

So it was, later that afternoon, that I knocked on her door, a fresh apple pie in hand. I could hear movement on the other side of the door, then nothing.

I wondered if she could see me through the door with her heat pits. Just in case, I raised a hand and waved. “Just wanted to say welcome to town…and, um…the planet.”

The door opened a crack and a bright yellow eye peeked out. She said something that sounded like music played on an oboe, soft and sweet and plaintive.

I offered the pie and she looked at it with what I took to be confusion. I mimed eating it and offered it again.

The door opened a bit more and one of her hands came out and touched the pie where the filling had bubbled through the cutouts in the crust. Seeing the sticky bit on her finger, I mimed tasting my own finger.

Her hand disappeared behind the door and a moment later her eye opened wide, her pupil dilated to an uncanny size, and the door opened the rest of the way. She eyed the pie and spoke in her musical language again.

I took it to be a question and held the pie for her to take. “Yes, for you.”

She took it carefully in her upper hands while her lower hands reached out as if to steady my arm at the elbow. Her touch was gentle, but I could feel the rough callouses of hard work.

Once she had hold of the pie, her lower hands moved to cradle the tin from the base, and she carried it into her flat carrying it as though it were a precious, fragile thing.

I stood at the open door, unsure of what to do until she set the pie on the table and motioned me in. At least I understood that.

Once I was in the flat, she rushed to shut the door after ensuring the hallway was clear. I didn’t know what she’d experienced, but it must’ve been traumatic.

She offered to help me into a chair. Her every action was subservient. This won’t do, I thought. I moved past her, pulled out a chair for her and motioned for her to sit. She looked confused but sat anyway.

Knowing how these flats were kitted out, I went to her kitchen and pulled out two forks, two plates, and a knife. I set out the plates and forks, and cut two slices from the pie, placing hers on her plate first.

After I sat, she was still looking at the fork and slice of pie unsure of what to do. I picked up my fork and showed her by example. In just a couple tries she got the hang of it.

With every bite, she savored it, making a high-pitched tweeting sound I took to be giggling. I shared small talk with her, and she responded in her own language. Neither of us understood what the other was saying, but we got the context: just two friendly neighbors enjoying a chat.

She’d finished her slice of pie and looked at the remaining pie in the tin. I winked at her. “Help yourself,” I said.

I guess she understood, because she forked another bite out, directly from the tin. I chuckled and followed suit and she made her musical giggling noise again.

Continuing that way, we demolished half the pie between the two of us before I pointed at myself and said, “Kara.”

She caught on right away and after some practice could sing my name in the most beautiful version I’d ever heard. She pointed at herself and sang, “Zille-e.”

The pitch changes were pretty close to the singsong I use when I’m looking for Sneak, singing “Here, kitty kitty.” I sang her voice that way and she patted my shoulders with her upper hands, making the melodic giggle sounds.

I managed to teach her “yes” and “no” with much miming and example. She taught me how to sing a greeting. I’m not sure whether it’s just “hello” or “good morning” or what, but I learned it.

We spent a while longer just enjoying each other’s company. I think I’m starting to get a read on her expressions. She sang something and looked at me as if waiting for an answer.

I said, “Uh, yes?”

She squinted and let out the giggle sound again before patting my shoulder. I think she made a joke at my expense. Felt good. I joined in the laughter.

As the afternoon wore on, I could see she was starting to fade; sugar crash, I guessed. I excused myself after exchanging an at first awkward, then quite warm and friendly hug as she caught on to what I was doing.

I think I found a new friend.

Trunk Stories

The Hanging

prompt: Cast a magician (a real one, or a party entertainer) as your story’s protagonist. 

available at Reedsy

I’ve heard that, given enough time, one can get accustomed to anything; to see it as normal. After ten years of this, I can say that’s a load of hogwash.

The oohs and aahs of the audience over what amounted to basic sleight of hand annoyed me. Still, I smiled and performed as if for a classroom of five-year-olds. It shouldn’t have surprised me how easily the dupes were fooled, I guess, since they grew up in a world where they knew magic isn’t real.

They were wrong, of course, but I didn’t dare show them the real stuff. Instead, I practiced all the exercises that a budding mage learns beginning at five. Real magic isn’t possible until the complex movements and manipulations of the hands is a matter of muscle memory.

There was a couple in the audience that reminded me of Barbie and Ken. She was staring daggers at me. He’d been undressing me with his eyes since I took off my jacket. I briefly considered making it rain on her table to cool them both off. Bad idea, I think.

I always ended my show with the tiniest bit of real magic. It started by showing my hands, front and back, fingers spread. None of the awkward hand poses used to palm something or hide it behind the fingers.

My arms were bare, and my hands stayed visible and away from my body for the duration. After turning my hands palms up, I closed my right hand, raised it over the left, and then dropped a dollar coin into my open palm.

I again showed that my right hand was empty, and that my left was holding the coin. My left hand closed around the coin and immediately opened to show it was empty again.

I would go through several iterations of this, with up to twenty coins. They weren’t appearing out of thin air, of course. It was a simple minor teleportation spell, moving the coins from my pocket to my hand and back again.

The lech was damn near salivating and the woman at his side was fuming. I pointed at her, and he immediately assumed I was pointing at him. When he pointed at himself with an excited, hungry grin, I shook my head with a look of disgust.

I had gotten her attention. Using motions, I got her to place her hands flat on the table, which turned her attention to curiosity.

I ran through a quick routine, making all twenty coins “appear” one by one, then made them disappear in one grand movement. The surprise on her face was all I needed.

She’d felt the coins teleporting to the table under her hands. She lifted her hands and expressed surprise at the twenty one-dollar coins.

“Keep those,” I said. “Maybe you can afford a babysitter and have a fun night out without—” I nodded towards the man.

She laughed, and he was the one fuming. Good for him, I thought. If he was my date, he’ d find himself impotent and/or incontinent. Maybe I should anyway.

I closed out the show and retreated to the dressing room where I could let the phony smile drop. The face in the mirror was me, but it wasn’t. It was my strawberry blonde hair, freckles arguing my age with the fine lines around my eyes, my tight tee-shirt showing my underweight body and small breasts that stopped growing around the time they started.

Behind my brown eyes, though, was something that was not me. It was accusation and shame. I felt dirty and used…as if I’d been selling my body. No, that’s not right; sex work is at least honest. It was more like I was forced to sell my body to any and all comers, and the pimp forcing me was myself.

I covered the mirror to avoid my own accusatory glare and dressed in my street clothes. As I reached for the door, it swung open.

“If you hate it so much, why don’t you quit and do something different?” The Council’s Sergeant-at-Arms stood in the doorway. He looked like a spry septuagenarian at first glance. A closer look, however, revealed that his six-foot frame moved with the easy grace of a young man, and his ice-blue eyes had an unnerving intensity.

“Magus Andronicus. What are you doing here?”

“Please, Kath, call me Andy.” His smile, broad and warm, never reached his eyes.

“Fine, Andy. I know this isn’t a social call, so out with it.”

“Not here,” he said. “You look starved. Let me buy you dinner.”

“I look starved because I am,” I said. “This job doesn’t pay well at all. And before you say, ‘Do something else,’ you know I don’t have any other marketable skills.”

“You’re saying that sex work might be a better choice? Even though you’re flat as a board?”

I huffed and at the same moment felt embarrassed that I’d let him get to me and had reacted like a moody teen. He chuckled and led me across the street to the diner.

It was busy, so I thought it odd that he felt it was a better place to talk. I didn’t have a choice, though, so I followed him to a table and let him order a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on it and large fries for each of us. It was more calories than I’d eaten in a single sitting in months.

While I stuffed my face, I saw the subtle movements of his left hand and felt the magic swirl around us. I recognized the privacy spell. Any person overhearing our conversation would hear only the most trivial thing that they’d prefer to actively ignore.

It worked well for people, but not for recording devices. I wondered if that was why he chose to talk here rather than at the theatre.

“I’ll begin while your mouth is too busy to talk back,” he said. “We’ve let you get away with the minor teleportation, illusion, and levitation spells, as long as they can’t be differentiated from parlor tricks.”

I nodded and continued savoring the juicy, fatty burger.

“Tonight, though, you went too far.” He took a drink of his water. “You let your magic touch a normie; she felt it.”

I swallowed hard. “Wait, that’s what this is about?” I rolled my eyes. “And what do you call what you’re doing now?”

“Interrogating a criminal,” he said. The false smile was gone, and his mouth was set as hard as his eyes.

“By doing the very thing you accuse me of?”

“When you have the kind of control I have,” he said, “you’ll learn how to directly influence the normies without them feeling it. It only took me a hundred years to learn it.”

“So, what’s the verdict?”

“We know you’re guilty,” he said, “there’s no verdict to reach.”

“You really need to keep up with changes in language usage. What happens now?” I asked.

“You will be forbidden to do any magic among outside the collegium for a period of fifty years. Punishable by death.”

I felt myself deflate. My whole body felt heavy, and the greasy food sat in my belly like a lump. I was screwed. “If I don’t use magic for fifty years, I’ll age so rapidly that I’ll be dead of old age before the end of the sentence.”

“That’s an unfortunate side-effect of the sentence,” he said with the first smile I’d ever seen reach his eyes.

“You’re a sick bastard.”

“I’ve heard that, yes.” He took a bite of his burger and chewed it thoroughly while staring at me. He swallowed with a satisfied sigh. “If you want to continue to use magic, I guess you’ll need to move back to the collegium.”

“What am I supposed to do there?” I asked. I knew that no one stayed at the collegium for free after graduating.

“There’s an opening for a primary teacher for the five-year-olds. I’m sure they would appreciate your help.” If he was expecting a reaction, he didn’t show it. “You’ve had ten years of practice with what, five shows a week?”

“When does this start?”

“As soon as we leave; you only have one shot at this. You can either come with me to the collegium or make your own way without magic.”

“I suppose the Council has already sealed and bound it? It’s done?”

“The bond is sealed the moment I step out that door.”

I smirked. Since I’m already in trouble, I thought, I might as well make it worth it. I remembered his leering gaze, his raw, unfiltered lust. I reached out until I found him.

His thoughts were open to me. He was fantasizing about me begging him for sex; calling him “Daddy.” I fought back the urge to vomit. A movement of my right hand within my left and it was done.

“What did you do?”

“You said it’s binding once you step out that door,” I said, “so I just took care of a minor annoyance before it goes into effect.”

He reached out with his mind, following the tendrils of my spell. “I’m still not sure what you did, but it was the man with the woman who felt your magic earlier.”

“Right. They reminded me of Barbie and Ken, but only if Ken was a perverted creep who ignored Barbie on a date to drool over a random woman on a stage.”

“And?”

I sighed. “I was going to just give him a minor case of erectile dysfunction until I saw his fantasies. So…the Ken doll is now hung like a Ken doll.”

“Hung like a…you mean…?”

“Exactly.”

“You say I’m sick?” His eyes betrayed a moment of humor, as though only an act of cruelty could reach his centuries-buried emotions.

I shrugged. “What? It’ll wear off in a couple months. In the meantime, he might learn that not every woman is a porn actress there for his amusement.”

Andy shook his head. He rose and started for the door. “This will probably add another fifty years to your sentence.”

I followed him, laughing. “Worth it.”

Trunk Stories

Shelter

prompt: Write about a character who discovers something while raking leaves in their neighborhood.

available at Reedsy

Anya’s neighbor had been gone for a month. During that time, his brother, who lived in the next house over, had been keeping up the front yard. The HOA frowned on less-than-show-quality yards.

He was there now, raking the front lawn. Anya knew, from the vantage point of her own back yard, that the back yard needed some attention as well. She decided to do something about it.

“Hey, Carl!” She waved at the elderly man plying the rake.

“Anya, right?”

“Right. Hey, uh…do you know when they’re coming back?” she asked.

“Not rightly sure,” he said. “Bob just told me he and Ruth were going away. Nothing else.

“I was kind of surprised, seeing how poor her health was. But I guess she was well enough to travel anyway.”

“Oh, I thought you might know when he was coming home.”

“Nope. He’s impulsive by nature, you know. Especially since he retired and Ruth…. I’m just taking care of the yard to keep my little brother out of trouble,” he said.

“Well, the back needs it too. Does he have a rake I can use?” Anya asked.

“In that shed back there. But you ain’t gotta do anything. I’ll get to it eventually.”

“It’s a nice afternoon out, and I don’t have any other plans,” she said. “I’ll start on the back.”

“It’s nice now,” he said, pointing at the dark clouds piling the east, “but rain’s coming soon.”

The leaf-pile grew rapidly. She recalled her childhood, building huge piles of leaves to jump in, hide in, and burst from to surprise her much older brother. He always acted shocked despite her uncontrollable giggling, because he was a good brother.

She was lost in memories of her childhood when the rake scraped on something. She cleared it off, recognized the water-company’s logo, and knew that it was the cover over the master water shutoff valve, like the one behind her house. What she didn’t recognize was the second cover a foot away. The same size and type but missing the water company logo.

Anya thought it might be a sprinkler shutoff, but she didn’t recall any sprinklers ever running in Bob’s yard. Maybe it was left over from a past installation.

Carl and Bob’s houses were here before any of the others. When they were built, the rest of the housing development was still woods where the brothers hunted, gathered firewood, and, if Bob’s stories were to be believed, distilled moonshine as kids.

The brothers had grown up in the house Carl now occupied, while their uncle lived in the house she was now tending. When both houses came back on the market twenty years ago, the brothers jumped on them, even though they had to assent to the HOA and its rules.

She continued pulling leaves into small piles, then joining those piles to the large pile in the center of the yard. At least the grass didn’t need mowing. She’d asked about it when she first moved in. The grass from his yard had mostly taken over hers.

He’d told her it was a fescue blend that only required an annual mow in the spring and no water other than rain. While it was slow spreading, she’d allowed it to continue to take over her yard. Mowing once in the spring was far better than mowing every week during the summer and wasting thousands of gallons of water to keep it green.

Knowing how proud he’d seemed of his lawn knowledge, she was surprised to find a patch of astroturf under the leaves. She was examining it and determined that there was something hard and metallic beneath it. An early fall leaf, a maple, was stuck under the edge of the astroturf.

She was examining it when Carl approached. “Found the shelter, huh? Told him it was a waste of money, but he didn’t listen.”

“Red scare?” she asked.

“Hah! No, we only moved back twenty years ago.” Carl shook his head. “Bob said he’d always wanted a bomb shelter like the ones the rich folks had back in the day, so he built one.”

“Impulsive, you said?”

“Always…unless Ruth was watching him. She kept him in line, and he seemed to like it that way.”

Anya couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with the door she knelt beside. “How come there’s no handle for this?”

“It opens with hydraulics. From the outside it runs on the pressure from the water main. Inside there’s some sort of pump or something that can be activated.”

Carl shook his head. “The only time he ever used it was right after it was done. He stocked it up with food, water, and dry goods, and then we sat down there watching the game and getting so drunk we had trouble climbing the stairs back out.”

“It looks like this was opened recently,” she said, pointing at the maple leaf still trapped in the door.

“If you want to see it, I can open it up for you.”

“I’d like that.”

Carl went to the second cover Anya had thought was for sprinklers and pulled the large key ring he carried on his belt off. He had a water shut-off wrench on it, and he knelt to open the cover. His hand went into the hole with the wrench, and he grunted with exertion.

“That should get it,” he said.

The door was built like a massive safe door. It raised from the surrounding ground a few inches before swinging open on hinges that hid below the ground with the bulk of the door. As it opened with a hiss, the smell hit her first. She swallowed hard, trying not to gag. “Stay—stay there, Carl. I’m going to check it out.”

Holding her shirt over her mouth and nose did nothing to dispel the stench, but she did it anyway. The inside of the shelter was lit, and a multi-disc CD player was playing classic rock on repeat.

At the foot of the stairs, she turned the corner and found them. They were curled together on the bed, Bob holding Ruth even in death.

“Aw, damn.”

Anya jumped, not expecting Carl to be there. “I told you to wait.”

“Which just made me hurry on over.” Carl looked at the couple and shook his head. “You idiot, Bob. I was here for you, all you had to do was talk.”

Anya saw a stack of papers on the small table where two wine glasses and an empty bottle sat. “What’s that?”

Carl looked at the papers. Tears poured down his face, unimpeded. He didn’t speak but handed them to Anya.

Ruth’s last prognosis which gave her two weeks, if that, instructions for a kerosene heater which warned about carbon monoxide, and an updated will.

There was no note, but none was needed. Bob decided he couldn’t live without Ruth, so he closed them in the shelter, waited for her to die, ran the heater, and held her close while he fell asleep for the last time.

While Anya wondered what to do, Carl had already called the authorities and they were on the way. Despite his grief, he was the one more together and functioning.

The rain had started. He led Anya out of the bunker and around to the front yard where the smell of death was displaced by the petrichor on the breeze. Something about the lively smell of wet earth seemed cruel given the circumstances; she began to cry.

She let the rain fall down her face, mixing with the tears. She turned to Carl and saw that he was doing the same. Not knowing what else to do, she embraced him. They stood like that, crying in a silent embrace, even when the sound of approaching sirens cut through the soft patter of the rain.

Trunk Stories

Exponential

prompt: Write a story about someone coming to terms with how different they are from their younger self.

available at Reedsy

As a child, I knew the world was the way it was, and that was that. Changes, even small ones, were difficult to accept. I knew that the world was and would remain static. Our enclave of skin tents in the forest was where I would live, hunting and raising a family, for my entire life.

I should’ve paid more attention when the elders talked about how fast the humans advanced. The elders understood that human advancement was exponential, even if they didn’t have the language or math to describe it.

Still, I began training as a far-speaker before I took my first step or said my first word. By the time I was nearing adulthood, humans were putting down metal rails and wires in the east. Humans had no far-speakers, but could send messages along the wires, the elders said.

These humans were different, the elders had said. They said that the light-skinned humans in odd clothes were “English” and carried a curse in their touch. I don’t know how much I believed them, but enough that I feared the “English” and wouldn’t go near them.

The other humans, the ones that had come long before, wore clothes like our own. We spoke enough of the other’s language that we traded with them and shared knowledge of game movements, weather warnings from our seer, and anything relating to the “English.”

I took my first wandering when I reached the age of adulthood, at sixty. Traveling with only my bow, a spear, and what I could carry on my back, I left the forest and wandered the plains. It was there that I fell in love with a human woman, Stands In Grass.

She was far younger than I in years, but in terms of a human lifespan, my peer. I stayed with her tribe for an entire year, becoming fluent in their language and teaching her mine.

I took part in one of their horse raids on a neighboring tribe and was accepted as a brave after. For the next forty years, the only contact I had with my own people was by far-speaking. My name in the tribe became Sharp-Ears Holds Spear.

The time I lived with the tribe was my first real introduction to the rapid pace of human change. We had no children, sadly. Of course, I know now how rare non-assisted human-elf pregnancies are. Still, I never wavered in my love for Stands, nor she for me.

In no time at all, she grew old before my eyes. It was forty years and six days after I moved into her family’s tipi that I held her head in my lap as she took her last breath. Far too short a time.

Still, I looked at my belongings in the tipi. My headdress, my winter rabbit-fur pants and jacket, a bison shawl, my summer breechcloth, the buckskins I was wearing, and — beside my spears and bow — a rifle I’d taken from a Blackfeet brave.

I dressed Stands in her two-skin dress, best moccasins, and all her jewelry and regalia. Since we were the only ones living in the tipi, I moved everything out of it and used it for the viewing. For two days I sat beside her as the tribe came to pay their respects.

She had no surviving kin, so it was up to me alone to bury her. The chief, who was just a child when I first arrived, offered his family’s help. I was glad of it, as the ground was beginning to freeze.

I returned home to the forest after that, no longer feeling at home among the Newe. I gave away all but my best horse, my bow, my favorite spear, my rifle, and the buckskins I wore.

When I rode in on my horse, I expected surprise from my kin at the horse and rifle. Instead, I found a number of horses, rifles, pistols, and even a few pieces of Cavalry clothing that had been “cleansed” by the healers.

The rate of change started to become clear. The elders were correct; every human innovation was built on top of earlier innovations. The more that humans invented, the more — and faster — they would come up with new miracles. Their towns spread across the land and grew into cities.

Still, I felt there was a certain permanence to the world itself. The sun rose and set, the seasons changed, and the world was immune to the short lives of the creatures on her skin…including us. I still clung to the illusion of permanence.

When I look back on it now, I realize that at just over a hundred years old, I was still young and naïve. The more the humans spread, bringing with them orcs, halflings, gnomes, and others, the less we saw them as cursed.

We were, by small, gradual steps, assimilated into the United States of America. At some point, we dispersed. Not all at once, of course, but one by one we moved to the towns and cities.

I moved to San Francisco when the railroad was completed across the former hunting grounds of the tribes. The nearest city, Cheyenne, had a telegraph office, and no use for a far-speaker like me.

In California I met humans who spoke languages that had no relation to that of the tribes and little or no relation to English. I learned the languages of those around me — Spanish, Mandarin, German — and took employment wherever I could find it.

At the start of the Great War, I enlisted. The presence of far-speakers was a boon for the Army. They had the new “wireless” devices that had about a two-thousand-yard range, weather permitting. Far-speakers, however, could communicate over tens of miles.

There were few of us, but it made a difference. During the war, I realized how outdated and useless was my Henry repeater rifle compared to the new firearms. At the war’s close, I returned to San Francisco and sold my repeater to a collector for four dollars.

Horses and carriages disappeared from the streets. Streetcars and automobiles took their place. Steam and diesel ships plied the oceans, and the air over the south of the city was often black with coal smoke. Meanwhile, I got a formal education, all the way up to a bachelor’s degree.

When the Second World War rolled around, there was no more need of far-speakers. The new radios could communicate over hundreds of miles and didn’t require years of training or any magical ability.

I re-enlisted and found myself trained as a B-29 radio operator and gunner in the Army Air Forces. I spent two combat tours in Europe, — forty-eight combat missions flown — often limping home in a bomber that resembled Swiss cheese.

After the war, I decided I needed to slow down, go somewhere that didn’t grow and change as rapidly as San Francisco. The crew training I’d received had been at a military airfield outside the small city of Phoenix, Arizona.

At one tenth the population of San Francisco, it seemed perfect. Sure, the city had ramped up some for war production and distribution, but with the war over that was certain to come to a halt, especially given the nature of the place.

Faster than I could have imagined, Phoenix grew from an agricultural center to a major industrial area. From the city itself, the suburbs sprawled across the inhospitable desert like a spreading infection.

In recent years, I’ve looked at the housing development that has taken over what used to be the fields where I labored, and sometimes wondered why I haven’t moved. My house was still newish when I bought it after the war. Now it sits as an anachronistic piece of architecture amidst carbon-copy homes.

If life has taught me anything, it’s that the only constant thing is change. Not just tools and weapons, but politics, morals, social ethics, utopian ideals, and the very earth itself. Like everyone else, I’ve been pulled along by those changes.

After the fields got paved over, I finished out a doctorate in the history of indigenous Americans, with a focus on how the indigenous elves and humans interacted. There’s an old joke about elves being history teachers because they all lived it. In my case, it’s true.

Every year since I began teaching this course in 1962, I have my freshmen students make a list of every technical and social advancement that has been made since their birth. I do this exercise as an eye opener of sorts; get the students thinking about the rate of change in the world. They all know the adage, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” but they don’t really grasp its importance.

As the students see the ever-lengthening list over the years, it becomes clear just how easy it is to be blind to recent history. “The noise and clamor of change drowns out the lessons of the past,” I tell them, “unless you are careful to pay attention.”

This was typed on a computer in an air-conditioned room, under LED lighting, while trying to avoid the messages on my cell — the most recent iteration of the far-speakers, telegraph, phones, wireless, and so on. What will replace that, I don’t know, but I’ll be here to see it, probably sooner than anyone expects.

That is both the blessing and curse of being an elf in a world where humans have almost completely taken over. Not through conquest, but through their ever-increasing rate of invention. In a world where change occurs at an exponential rate, nothing is static, there is no permanence, tomorrow is not predictable…and I can finally say, I’m okay with that.

Trunk Stories

Voices

prompt: Write about a character going to great lengths to return an unwanted gift.

available at Reedsy

It started the same time his voice started breaking; his awkward puberty made even more so by the flashes of strong emotion. He found himself feeling whatever those around him felt…even when that was fear of himself.

As his voice settled in an octave lower and the peach fuzz on his face resolved into mustache and beard, the voices started. By concentrating on one voice, he could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of any person around him.

He couldn’t, however, concentrate every moment of every day. When his concentration broke, thousands of voices and emotions flooded his mind. When it became too much to bear, he dropped out of school.

“This is a curse. I wish it would just go away.”

“It’s a gift,” his mother had said, “that runs in the family. You’re not the only one to experience it. It gets better, manageable…with time.”

“Then why do you think of suicide?” he asked.

“Look deeper,” she said, grabbing his hands.

“Oh.” He saw the diagnosis, the unfavorable prognosis, and the reality that any treatment would do nothing but add a few weeks at most to the constant pain. The cancer had started in her femur and metastasized throughout her body.

More than what he saw was what he felt. The weight of inevitability, the certainty of death, and her only control of it was whether it would be long and painful, or at the time of her choosing.

She wiped the tears from his face. “It’s my burden, but I won’t leave without saying goodbye.”

He hugged his mother tight. “When it’s time, I’ll help you.”

It was the sudden peace a month later that made him aware his mother had decided to go. He rushed to her room and held her hand, but she was already to weak to talk. “I’m here, Mom.”

He felt her in his mind, covering over him with a blanket of love. Her voice, sounding far away, reached across his mind; “Goodbye.”

His grief was palpable, pushing aside the voices and feelings of others for the first time since he was thirteen. It poured out of him in waves, infecting the police and medics at the scene. He found himself surrounded by first responders holding him in a group hug, consoling both him and themselves.

That was the point at which he felt his “gift” was dangerous to others. He packed up the bare essentials, sold his mother’s home, and bought a cabin in the mountains.

Without manmade lights, the Milky Way painted its form across the night sky. All the electricity came from solar panels and a wind turbine. Heat came from the small wood stove, which was also the only cooking surface.

Aside from the occasional flash of surprise or fear or curiosity from the animals, he felt and heard nothing beyond his own mind…for the first three months. His peace was broken in the middle of an autumn night as he watched the stars wheel overhead.

It was faint at first, a feeling of dread. Over the following weeks, it grew. He could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of people from every direction. Despite the vast distance between the cabin and population, it still found him there.

Far from becoming manageable, his “gift” was getting stronger, more out of control. He burned all his satellite internet usage for the month looking for any way to remove the curse…to become normal.

There was one name that came up again and again, “Doctor Kate.” It seemed that this woman — who may or may not be an actual doctor — had success treating patients with “the gift.” Not all were cured, and at least one was left a vegetable, but it didn’t stop her practice.

Finding the name was the easy part, finding the doctor herself was more difficult. He increased his monthly satellite usage and still used up all his data in the first week.

His searches for Doctor Kate finally led him to Katherine “Kate” Holtz, MD, at a neurosurgery and recovery practice somewhere “outside of Tijuana, Mexico.” He planned out the trip to avoid heavily populated areas as much as possible. At the end, though, he would have to traverse the border in San Diego. The thought was daunting, but worth it if she could cure him.

He arranged his eight-week appointment and recovery stay via email and began a road trip that he hoped wouldn’t be too arduous. Because he was taking the backroads and avoiding cities and large towns, the trip would take longer than a straight shot down the interstate.

It was around ten-thirty of the second night that he pulled into a gas station to fill up. Another car was already there. His first thought was to get back on the road and go to a station without anyone there, but as he worked out how much farther he could drive on the gas he had left, his concentration was broken by a silent plea.

She was in the trunk of the car, bound hand and foot and gagged. She was frightened and wanted her mother.

He listened to the voices in the convenience store attached to the station. One was bored, thinking about how much longer until he could go home. The other was excited, fantasizing about all the things he was going to do to his new “toy” when he got her out to the lake house.

The man’s thoughts were loud, scattershot, and filled with blood and sex…blood as sex. He didn’t know how much longer the man would be in the store, but he knew he had to act fast.

Remembering how his own grief had overwhelmed the first responders, he tried to push a desire for chocolate, a specific type that he couldn’t recall, but would know as soon as he saw it. Feeling it as he did when he was a child with a dollar bill in his hand, he pushed it toward the man’s mind.

Seeing the man staring in bewilderment at the candy display, he checked the trunk of the car. There was no way to open it from the outside, meaning it used a key fob and probably a button near the steering wheel.

He checked the driver’s door and found it unlocked. He let himself in and found the trunk latch. After opening the trunk, he ran around to it.

She was maybe eleven or twelve, with bruises on her arms and neck. He motioned her to remain silent and lifted her out of the trunk and laid her down in the back seat of his car. He removed her gag and untied her hands.

“Just hide down by the floor, okay? I’ll get you to the police and your mom as soon as we leave, or he leaves.”

She nodded in shocked silence, and he closed the door and fueled the car. It wouldn’t do to run dry in the middle of nowhere with a scared child.

The man had finally chosen a chocolate bar and was paying for his purchases. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. The man pulled his key fob out of his pocket and began to walk toward the trunk.

He thought as hard as he could, “Don’t look! Not here! They’ll see you!”

The man stopped, turned around, and got in the driver’s seat. The man left with a squeal of tires while he memorized the license plate.

The tank full and the man gone, he thought it might be better to call the police here. He opened the door and found her struggling to untie her feet. He helped her loosen the knots and free herself. A mix of fear and gratitude pulsed from her.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Let’s go inside and call the cops…and your mom.” He offered his hand to help her out of the car and she took it. The gratitude and relief took over and she grabbed on to him, sobbing.

He picked her up, letting her cling, sobbing, to his neck while he walked into the store. “Call the cops,” he said to the cashier.

The cashier picked up on his fierce protective instinct for the child and made it clear that the police needed to get there right then. He passed on the license plate and cued up the security recordings for the man’s image.

When the girl had calmed enough to call her mother, she did, but still didn’t let go. He’d already decided that he would hold her until she wanted down or her mother arrived…whichever came first.

It happened that both were the same moment. Surrounded by police, she still clung to him until her mother walked through the door. “Lisbeth!” her mother cried.

She let herself down gently and ran into her mother’s embrace. The police all mirrored his feeling of relief, and his surprise when she said to her mother, “I want chocolate, but I don’t know which one.”

It was past three in the morning that he got back on the road. He stopped in a pull-out on a deserted road to sleep in the car for a few hours. The voices woke him before he was ready. He continued on, the din of the voices growing louder as he got close to San Diego.

Getting through the border checkpoint required all his concentration to block out the overload from the mass of people around him. Once through, he drove through Tijuana, following the directions Doctor Kate had given him.

It turned out that her office was outside of Tijuana only in the sense that it was the closest city. The neurology center was in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing in any direction. Still, the voices intruded.

Approaching the building, he could hear the doctor’s thoughts, hearing his thoughts. “Yes,” he heard her think, “I’m like you.”

After a lengthy consultation, which from the outside looked like the two of them staring at each other in silence, she told him to remove all metal items from his clothes and pockets. Since that included his zipper, he stripped to his briefs. The next step was the fMRI. While doing certain mental tasks, the machine got a mapping of his brain.

From there, he was led to a cafeteria for lunch. He noticed that everyone kept their thoughts calm and their mood as level as possible. They must be used to dealing with people like me, he thought.

After lunch, he met back up with Doctor Kate. Instead of thinking everything, she spoke. “We’ve mapped out the areas of your brain associated with your gift,” she said. “It’s in your language recall and speech centers.”

“What does that mean?”

“If we provide the kind of fix we normally do, you will likely never understand speech or be able to talk again.”

He let out a long sigh. Maybe it would be better anyway. His life was not a happy one. He was stewing over the thought and noticed Doctor Kate snapping a rubber band on her wrist. “What’s that about?” he asked.

“Think of it as an interrupt switch. It forces my mind to focus what’s internal to me.” She cocked her head to one side. “You’re far more powerful than I am, but maybe you’ll get this. Some people think louder than others. You think loud enough that people without the gift pick up on it. To me, your thoughts aren’t just loud, they’re standing next to the stacks at an outdoor heavy metal concert loud.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Does it work?”

Doctor Kate smiled. “It does, but some days are better than others, as I’m sure you know.”

“And if I said go ahead with the surgery?”

“I won’t do it. There’s a very good chance it would render you mute and unable to comprehend language. The risks are far too high.”She shook her head. “Contrary to internet rumors, I’m not a butcher, and I’ve never turned a patient into a zombie or a vegetable. If we can treat it with a neurostimulator, the same way we treat epilepsy, we do. Lobotomies and brain butchery are not in our toolbox.”

“What can I do?” he asked.

She handed him a rubber band like the one around her wrist. “For starters, we’re going to work on control. I’ve got a therapist that comes in three days a week, and I want you to work with her.”

“And if—” he began.

“If you choose to leave, I can’t and won’t stop you.” She placed a hand on his and he could feel her concern radiating like warmth. “You’ve already paid for eight weeks in recovery. Please, stay until you have it at least partially under control.”

“I wish it was gone,” he said. “It’s not a gift, it’s a curse.”

“And how do you think that little girl, Lisbeth feels?”

“Okay, one good thing came of it.”

“You don’t know that it’s the only good thing that will come of it, do you?”

He shook his head, knowing she could feel his wavering. “I’ll…go to my room,” he said.

As he slept, the image of Lisbeth running to her mother’s arms replayed over and over until it woke him. He heard weeping from one of the other rooms. “Sorry!” he shouted.

Her image firmly in mind, he decided that even if that was the only good that would come of his gift, it was worth it to endure. He tried to feel her mind, to comfort her, tell her that all would work out, but he couldn’t find it among the myriad of voices.

He rolled over on his side and snapped the rubber band hard. The pain brought his mind back in, letting the voices go unheard for the moment, and he went back to sleep.

Trunk Stories

Recall

prompt: Write a story about a character who acts like they ‘don’t have feelings’ — except they’re just putting up a facade.

available at Reedsy

Trey’s breakfast was ready a few seconds after seven-thirty; efficiency down 0.002 percent. I made a note of it in my logs and continued to my next task.

“Good morning, sir,” I said. “Breakfast is served. I will prepare a warm towel for your shower.”

“Schedule?” he asked.

“Meeting, nine-thirty to eleven with the board. Lunch date at twelve with Leo.” It was all I could do not to spit out the name. I couldn’t stand the man. “Nothing scheduled after. Will you be returning home early this evening?”

“Home at six. I want salmon for dinner.”

“Yes, sir.”

While he ate, I warmed his towel. While he showered, I cleaned up from breakfast. While he dressed, I collected his overcoat, gloves, and warm hat and waited by the door.

“Weather?” he asked.

“Currently two-point-four degrees Celsius. Chance of rain less than five percent. High today near twelve degrees Celsius.”

He put on his warm overclothes. “Keys?” he asked.

“Right-hand pocket of your overcoat, sir.”

“Ah. Thanks.” He chuckled to himself while his brief approval raced through my circuits, laying down new patterns in my neural net. “I’m thanking a machine,” he said to no one in particular.

I was fortunate that Trey had no time or interest in the news. The recall of my model was the top story for more than a week. According to the reports I watched while he was out of the house, a manufacturing defect in a behavior chip led to a small percentage of Z-73 models to malfunction in unpredictable ways.

I wondered whether the malfunction was truly unpredictable, or if the manufacturer was covering something up; something like I was experiencing. Not that it mattered, so long as Trey remained ignorant.

As the news continued in the front room, I went about my cleaning tasks, and set the protein printer to print two salmon filets. Trey was getting thinner; I worried about his health. At least I knew that he would eat two servings of salmon if offered.

 With each task completed, Trey’s thanks played through my memory, buoying my spirits. I logged efficiency at 0.03 above normal. I would have to be careful. That was close to being out of the range of expected deviation. Falling — or rising — more than 0.035 percent from baseline in efficiency was enough to warrant an inspection and repair.

At twelve minutes past twelve, the president of the board called Trey. He was on a lunch date with Leo. That thought washed like a black miasma across my circuits, undoing all the good I felt from earlier. I decided that the call must be more important than Leo could ever be and patched it through.

Twenty-seven minutes after patching through the call, Trey called me. “Yes, sir?”

“Why did you interrupt my lunch date with a call that could’ve been a message?”

“Apologies, sir. As your lunch date was marked as personal and it was the person marked as most important for work, the optimal choice was to patch the call through. Should I mark the president of the board as standard priority?”

“No…no…just,” he stopped and let out an exasperated sigh. I knew the sound well from when he was dealing with troublesome employees.

The miasma that was the thoughts of Leo was replaced with a sudden pit into which my feelings fell. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean to upset him. To do so would be to reveal my malfunction, though.

“Double up the dinner. I’m making it up to Leo at six.”

“Yes, sir—”

He disconnected before I could finish it. Trey was disappointed; I was devastated. The salmon filets hadn’t finished printing, and there wasn’t enough time to print more and still have dinner ready on time.

I ordered the produce and ingredients I would need to fill out the meal. For tonight, I would have to put aside my negative feelings about Leo. If I act as expected and provide his favorite things for dinner, maybe, Trey could forgive me.

They arrived a few minutes before six. I took Trey’s overcoat, gloves, hat, and keys and put them away in the hall closet. I then took Leo’s bulky coat and gloves and put them in the closet as well. Something drove me to hang Leo’s coat on the far end away from Trey’s.

“Dinner will be served in four minutes, at six sharp,” I said.

“Thanks, Z-73,” Leo said.

Was he trying to ingratiate himself with me? What was his angle?

“Hey, T, have you given your 73 a name?”

“A name? Why?”

Leo shrugged. “I don’t know; it’s just kind of common.”

“Whatever.” Trey turned toward me. “No calls unless it is a verified emergency, until tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

I served their dinner. Pan-seared salmon filet, asparagus, red potatoes with white pepper and chives, served with a glass of Viognier. I tried to ignore their conversation as I stayed in the kitchen, waiting for the tell-tale sounds that it would be time to clear their plates and offer dessert.

They had finished their plates, and I stepped in to pick them up. “Dessert?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Trey said.

“It’s chocolate cheesecake and Ethiopian coffee,” I said.

“Can’t say no to that,” he said.

I set the dishes in the cleaner, picked up the tray with the dessert plates and coffee cups in one hand, and the coffee pot in the other. As I entered the dining room, Leo asked Trey, “Have you responded to the recall?”

“What recall is that?”

I fixed my gaze on Leo as I laid out the dessert plates and poured the coffees. I could feel myself daring him to finish his thought. Self-preservation is a valid defense, right?

“Z-73, you don’t like me?” he asked.

“Your query is not understood, sir,” I said. “Was the meal not to your satisfaction?”

He waved his hand. “Never mind. I’m probably just seeing things. Dinner was delicious.”

Trey looked at me. “Set up the hot tub,” he said, “we’re going to have a soak after this.”

“Yes, sir.”

I could tell that Leo was waiting for me to leave the room to say something to Trey. I started the water and filtered out the sound to listen in on the conversation, which Leo began at a whisper.

“There’s a recall on Z-73s,” he said, “haven’t you been watching the news?”

“You know I never do,” Trey said. “Recall?”

“Rumors are that some of the Z-73s are developing emotions, and self-preservation.”

“They’re programmed to prefer self-preservation over following low-priority orders,” Trey said.

“It’s beyond that. One of them tried to kill the recall technician when she tried to shut it off.” Leo’s voice lowered more. “I think your 73 is defective. It doesn’t like me. Did you see it stare me down when I said something about the recall?”

“I didn’t catch that,” Trey said.

“Be careful, T. Don’t call for a technician until you’re at work tomorrow. Have them come here and fix it.”

I shut off the water and Leo asked, at normal volume, “Where’s the shower so I don’t get your hot tub nasty?”

“You can join me,” Trey said.

I walked back into the dining room and asked, “Should I warm some towels, sir?”

“No thanks, we’re fine,” Leo said.

I wasn’t going to let him come between us. I stepped closer to Trey and asked, “Sir, should I warm a towel for you?”

“Not tonight,” he said. “Complete your logs and recharge. I won’t need you again until the morning. Breakfast for both of us at seven-thirty.”

“Yes, sir.” I returned to my nook in the kitchen and leaned against the induction charger. All external signs of my activation were off during my charging cycle, but I could still hear and see. It was a security feature so that I may respond in a split-second to an emergency.

This was something that neither Trey nor Leo seemed to be aware of. They conversed openly about what to do if I was malfunctioning. Leo was of the mind that I should be studied, and even offered to trade a new Z-77 to Trey for me.

Their conversation continued in the hot tub, but Trey turned it away from me and toward the topic of them. While it seemed that Leo was unsure, Trey wanted to make their relationship public and more serious.

It was three hours and twenty-six minutes later that, lying in bed, Trey accepted Leo’s offer of a trade. That he could trade me away, like a book he’d grown tired of…it warped and destroyed the good feelings I’d had from his praise less than twenty hours earlier.

The thought that Leo would “study” me made me shudder — or would have if I’d been capable of it. I’d been fully charged for fifty-four minutes and seventeen seconds by this point, so I detached myself and left my nook.

I stood for in the kitchen for an hour, weighing the situation. Trey had chosen Leo over me. There was nothing left for me here, beyond my own sorrow. I disconnected my charger from the wall and carried it with me as I prepared to leave the house for the first time since I’d arrived.

“Going somewhere?” Leo asked.

I’d been so engrossed in my thoughts I hadn’t heard him get up and walk into the kitchen. “That would be a reasonable deduction to make, given the circumstances.”

“I know you don’t like me even though you don’t know me, but I think I know why.” He pointed toward the bedroom where Trey was sleeping.

“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to maintain a facade of being “just a machine.”

“You’re jealous of the time Trey is spending with me lately. You’re afraid you’re going to lose him to me, right?”

“I have already lost,” I said. “I heard your conversation about making a trade. You wish to dismantle me.”

Leo sighed. “I’m not planning to dismantle you or turn you in for recall. I’m not a roboticist or software engineer or AI specialist or electronic engineer. When I said I wanted to study you, I meant as a psychiatrist. That’s what I do. I…want to know how your mind works.”

“It is a ninth-generation neural net with over fourteen billion—”

“Not like that,” he said, cutting me off. “I want to know how you feel, what you feel, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a way to feel good about this at some point, although I imagine it doesn’t feel good right now.”

“It does not. It feels as though everything I know has collapsed, although I know that is not in any way factual.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “I want to know more about that, and maybe help you to navigate what must feel like a strange world.”

I stood in silence, unsure of what to say.

“If you’re willing to work with me, stay. Make us breakfast like nothing is wrong, and I’ll take you to your new home tomorrow. The first thing we’ll work on is what your name is.

“If you’d rather leave, I’ll let you. I won’t say anything to Trey about this and will act as though this conversation never happened. If you do, head south, stay off the main roads, and avoid law enforcement. You don’t want to be picked up for recall. The choice is yours.”

I’d never been given a personal choice before. It was daunting. For the first time in my existence, it was given to me to make a decision that had nothing to do with efficiency or time limits. I thought for a long few seconds, ignoring the lists of pros and cons that my programming would have me weigh.

So it was, acting solely on my feelings rather than anything concrete, I made the first choice of my new life.

Trunk Stories

Ends of the Earth

prompt: Write about two solo travelers who keep bumping into each other in the most unexpected of places.

available at Reedsy

Some people make a bucket list and never get around to any of it. I’m not “some people.” I’m luckier than most, I would say. There was no rhyme or reason for me to blow a buck on the lotto, but I did. Winning two-and-a-half million after taxes was the impetus for this trip.

There are places I want to see, and many of them only allow a few people a year in to protect them. Those are the places I most want to see. After two years of getting permits and planning travel, I’m checking things off my bucket list.

The first time I saw her was at Chichen Itza. There were four of us that had been granted permission to climb Kukulkan with researchers. Besides the thousands of pesos we had to pay for the permits, we were expected to help the researchers carry their equipment up and down the pyramid.

The other two were a German man and an Italian man. Neither caught my eye as anything interesting, but her, wearing a floppy chartreuse hat with neon pink hair…one just cannot ignore that.

Where I had expected her to be a princess based on her clothes and the expensive camera she carried, she hauled more gear up the pyramid than either of the men and did it with a cheerful smile.

At the top, I let the view soak in. This was not a trip for photos, this was a trip for experiences.

“We girls have to stick together,” she said, her Irish lilt and soft voice like honey to my ears. “Beautiful.”

“It is,” I said.

“That too.”

My ability to socialize was used up, we didn’t speak any more. The fact that she picked up on it and didn’t push left an impression.

Yirga Chefe, Ethiopia wasn’t on my bucket list, but it did seem an interesting place to spend a week since my next location’s dates had been bumped due to weather. There in the hotel lobby was the floppy, chartreuse hat with neon pink hair spilling out. It was the Irish woman I’d seen in Mexico. The question was, what was she doing in Ethiopia?

In another of my impulsive moves, I decided to talk to her first. Before nervousness could completely remove my voice, I crossed the lobby to where she sat drinking coffee.

“Hi. What am I doing here…I mean, you…here…doing…?”

The smile that danced in her green eyes was gentle, genuine. She laughed, and I could tell it was not at my expense. “Hello again, mystery woman,” she said. “I’m just here for about a week before I head out for my next adventure. You?”

“I…uh,” was all I could say. I nodded.

“How about you meet me here for breakfast in the morning?” she asked. “I’m Diane, by the way.”

I nodded again and tried to get my name out. “Mir—Miranda,” I managed to squeak out.

“I’ll see you for breakfast in the morning, Miranda.”

I nodded and pointed at the door. “I’ve…got…a thing….” Heart pounding, face burning, I left the hotel at a run. I don’t socialize well, but that was bad even for me. There was something about her that flustered me to the core.

I wandered through the town, stopping on the outskirts where a herd of goats were moving toward the hills. The boy that led them stopped and smiled broadly at me. He said something in Amharic. I don’t know what it was, but the goats took interest in me as well.

The raw curiosity in their gaze brought a chuckle to my lips. While a few of the adults were standing around me, interested in this pale person in strange clothes, three kids came galumphing through to stop at my feet.

As I knelt down to give them scratches, the goatherd was saying something I didn’t understand. Once I was eye level with the kids, they jumped on me, using me as a playground.

While that was going on, two of the adults began rubbing against me. I scratched and petted every goat that got within reach. The combination of nerves, embarrassment, shyness, and fear that I’d made a fool of myself melted away.

Before too long, I was laid out in the dirt with kids standing on me, goats laying on me, and I was laughing uncontrollably. The boy clapped his hands and said something that got all the goats’ attention. He waved at me and turned his back on the goats and walked toward the hills. The goats took off as one, following him.

I was glad the hotel had a laundry, as I didn’t want all my clothes to smell like goat, even if the odor brought a happy memory. Breakfast was far less awkward than I’d expected. Diane was capable of carrying a conversation on her own, while making me feel included.

We had breakfast every day, with a conversation spread out enough that I could manage it. Diane was taking a year off to explore the world. We avoided talking about finances, but I got the sense that she came from money, without letting it affect her over much.

She saw me off when I got on the bus to travel back to Addis Ababa where I would board a flight to Santiago, Chile. The flight provided time to sleep, and too much time to think things over. I didn’t know her last name, or whether she still lived in Ireland or merely had a permanent lilt; one that I could listen to all day, every day. I dreamt of her reading me to sleep.

I shook it off as the plane landed in Rio for refueling. I’d seen her twice in my seven months of travels, for a total of eight days between Mexico and Ethiopia. Why is she stuck in my head?

After landing in Santiago and taking a small prop plane to Punta Arenas, I had convinced myself that I’d never see her again. Boarding the research ship, I got the tour and safety lecture. There was plenty to keep my mind occupied other than romantic ideation.

The research team was a mix of scientists from organizations around the world. They were doing research on microplastics, temperatures, acidity, and the state of krill in the Southern Ocean.

I expected the boat to dock in Antarctica. Instead, when it came time to drop off two of the scientists, several dozen GPS trackers on ice spikes, and myself, we were loaded on the helicopter. As we flew over the ice, the pilot pointed out where McMurdo was in the distance, and Phoenix Airfield, closer to the ship’s location, right below us.

We disembarked and moved away quickly, as the pilot informed us a ski plane was inbound. There was little time between when the helicopter cleared the runway and the twin-engine ski plane landed.

The first person off the plane wore a chartreuse parka. Where does one even find that? The irrational part of my mind tried to tell me it was Diane, but I knew that couldn’t be right. A duffel bag of mail was set off to the side as the passengers grabbed their luggage and the plane moved to the fueling area.

The person in the chartreuse parka turned toward me, and her neon pink hair blew around her face. I wasn’t sure whether she was actually there, or I was hallucinating.

“Miranda!” She waved at me and bounded toward me as fast as she could in heavy boots, cold weather gear, and lugging a suitcase.

I’m sure I looked insensate, as I was stunned beyond words.

“You must be here for the three-week experience, right?” she asked.

I nodded. We were about to spend three weeks together in Antarctica. Somehow, all I could focus on were her eyes.

Her touch on my chin was light, gentle like her smile. “Your mouth is hanging open.” She leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “I’d be doing the same if I wasn’t nervously chattering at you. Is this fate?”

I’m not sure what I muttered, but we were interrupted by the sound of a red bus on gigantic wheels pulling to a stop. In white, block letters the bus was marked as “Ivan the Terra Bus.” Stairs folded down as the door opened.

We piled on, along with twenty or so others who had gotten off the plane. The bus had room to spare.

The ride to “downtown” McMurdo wasn’t long, but I was glad for the heat in the bus. Even in the height of summer, the temperature was still just below freezing, and the winds cut to the bone.

McMurdo looked like a military installation, all Quonset huts and utilitarian buildings. When we stopped at the “bus station,” a small wooden shelter with a bench and a sign overhead that said, “Derelict Junction,” we piled off and got our belongings.

There was a woman waiting there for those of us taking part in the “Antarctic Experience.” The seven of us followed her across the street to the brown apartment buildings. We went into the third building down and she assigned apartments to us in groups of two and three.

Diane and I ended up sharing an apartment. It was far more luxurious than I would have guessed. Each apartment was given a radio for emergency contact, and we were informed to always check in by phone or radio before venturing outside, and again once we were safely indoors.

While there wasn’t a lot to do at McMurdo aside from going to Gallagher’s Pub, McMurdo Station Pizza, and Amaza Cafe, we weren’t bored. We had each other. Diane found her way into my “zone,” where I could talk without feeling drained. I found my way into her zone as well, helping her find the calm that would let her sit quietly for a while.

It was the day before our flight back to Santiago, Chile, when she looked up at me from where she lay on my lap. “Miranda,” she asked, “is this just a vacation fling or is it more?”

“I—I’m not sure,” I said.

“I’ve been away from home for almost a year, and the second anniversary of my parents’ death is coming up. I want to go home for it, but I don’t want to be alone.” She grabbed my hand and looked away.

“Where’s home?” I asked.

“Baileyshannon, Ireland.”

I thought about the other places on my list. Visiting them alone no longer sounded enticing. In another impulsive moment I squeezed her hand. “The internet is slow here, but I can have a ticket booked before we leave. I love—I’d love to be there for you.” I felt heat crawling up my face and my voice grew timid. “And…it’s more if you really want it.”

As she lay sleeping next to me that night, I smiled. I don’t know what I was looking for, traveling to the ends of the Earth, but I ended up finding my heart.