BALDUR: I fall in love every year.

It happens in the summer, when all across the States heat strips clothes away from skin so the bright sun soaks inside, staining darker and darker, burning pink, and pulling out freckles. You know they call those Baldur kisses.

After me.

I fall for the beautiful girls, and I don’t particularly care what’s on the inside. Our affairs are destined to be so brief I hardy have time to discover any real depth, if it happens to exists. Which I suspect is rare, because any woman with depth is going to know who I am and exactly how it will end.

You were different.


SUSAN: “Baldur the Beautiful,” I said, thunking a sweating glass of iced tea in front of him. “What brings you here? The forecast calls for clouds all week.” I slid my hands into my apron pockets, fingering my notepad. Does a god eat? I didn’t want him to take up my table and then not order enough for a decent tip. Even those pretty eyes wouldn’t feed me tonight.

He flashed a smile hotter than the sun. “I believe I came here for you, beautiful.”

I laughed despite myself. “Does that line ever work?”

“I usually don’t need a line.” He winked. “What’s best to eat?”

“Crow.”

Baldur’s eyes mirrored the sky, roiling and gray today from all the clouds. When he widened them it was like seeing two spinning cyclones. ( I did not want to fall inside. )

For the stone-cold sum of five hundred dollars a week, Richard Casey hired me to watch him sleep.

I know what you're thinking, but not every help-wanted ad ends in depravity. It wasn't like that. When I called, the voice on the line sounded hoarse and exhausted. The listing wasn't even in the kink section.

I was looking for placement as a personal assistant—making calls or taking dictation, arranging dentist appointments for old, rich men who can't be bothered to buy their own socks or pick up their dry-cleaning. What I got was Richard.

He was tall and sullen, with three days of stubble and forty years worth of shadows under his eyes.

The first night, I brought a thermos of coffee and two sandwiches and a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five.

“What is that?” he said, staring at the book.

I gave him a long look. “An American classic.”

“Put it out on the steps and don't bring it again.”

I did what he said because it was his show, and because I needed the money. I'd read it twice already, and anyway, there are all kinds of eccentricities you'll put up with if you really need to get paid.( . . . )

All I could think is, I have to get this giant out of the car before Jonathan gets here.

The sun burnt my back as I rested my hand on the roof of my little Jaguar XKE and leaned to look in the driver’s window. “You should come out now.”

The giant, folded rather uncomfortably over the passenger seat and the tiny nonexistent back seat of the coupe, peered back at me with small, black eyes. His voice was like the rumble of the exhaust. “Some things are an option. Some things are not.”

“Well, how did you get in there?” I demanded. “Get out the way you came in.”

The giant didn’t answer, and I pressed the heel of my hand into my right eye.

Sure enough, when Jonathan got there, he took it personally.

“Oh, I see how it is,” he said. His Volvo sported three Stillwelll bumper stickers; since he’d become an aide for Stillwell, he’d apparently decided that bumper stickers on luxury cars weren’t trashy after all. He twisted the knot of his I’m-useful-call-on-me tie and sneered at the Jag. “You don’t want to go to the show, so you put this giant in your car.”

“I want to go,” I protested. “You are being completely melodramatic.”

“This is just like you.” Jonathan opened the passenger side door of the Jaguar and gestured at the cramped giant’s body inside. The giant didn’t look at him; he was too crushed to turn his head. Jonathan said, “Oh, I’d love to go, Jonathan, I really would, but he’s completely stuck. Trust you, Ashley, to go to absolutely obscene lengths to avoid having to say ‘no’. Fine! Call me when you have gotten rid of the giant in your life and decided to become emotionally available.”


( Read More . . . )

My father is called the Giant King. Not because he is particularly large, or because he rules over a people of great stature. It is because he defeated them.

Before I was born, the northern edge of our lands were deserted of human civilization. Twenty leagues spread from the foothills of the mountains before the first villages appeared. It was farmable land, but no families ventured onto the fertile plain for fear of the midnight raids by wandering bands of giant-folk.

I heard tales in the nursery of entire villages burned to the ground, crops eaten in one night, church steeples knocked over, crossroads marked with severed heads.

And I heard stories of my father galloping into battle, sword raised, cutting giants down single-handedly. He led cavalry across the empty fields and into the mountains, hundreds of brave men and women with him, climbing up and up onto the peaks.

And father returned alone, with only two of his best men. At the loss of nearly all, we have triumphed! he yelled from the city gates. Five days of celebration followed, and he was crowned king, though his cousin was the true heir.

At first, people were tentative, but after one winter free of raids, and then another and another, the citizens allowed the threat of giants to pass into story.

By the time I was seventeen, giants had become memories of massive beasts with curling horns and rows of fangs. Their eyes glowed yellow and they dripped green pus from open sores. Not one had been seen in a generation, and the empty fields held some of the grandest deer hunting in the kingdom. The foothills were known for their dangerous boars.

( I was there with a party of cousins, to take down our first wild pig. )

*This week, our common prompt comes from patesden. The illustration is by Rolf Winkler and comes from the story MUGEL THE GIANT.

Hansen von Reiche is simply too big to be allowed. He's like an oak tree come to life. If a boy could be a mountain or a government-sponsored monument, that's him—all vast and knobby and walking around.

I think about this on various occasions, usually on days when the forecast calls for ideal sports weather and I've been picked last for something. Hansen is always picked first, even for the games he's not very good at. I can only assume this is due to his size, but I don't make a big thing about it. Anyway, I have plenty of other things to worry about. PE is like a special kind of death-march.

Hansen plays lacrosse and varsity football. He plays rugby for the city league, because the high school athletics department doesn't offer it. He does not actually have to take PE because his extra-curricular activities earn him an exemption. But he takes it anyway, which is downright mystifying. Like there are not enough opportunities for brutality. He actually has to go looking for more excuses to run around smashing people.

On the first day of the semester, he stepped on me, which was scary and painful, but mostly it was mortifying. Like, here you go thinking that you matter, or that you take up any space at all, and then someone huge and careless comes along and makes it very clear that you don't.

He said that he was sorry. Yeah, that's hysterical. The look he gave me was like I barely even registered—this inconsequential insect, or a coffee table that he kind of bumped into. Ever since then, he makes this big thing of protecting me. Like if we're playing flag football and I have to block him, he doesn't even try to avoid me. He just puts his hands on my shoulders and guides me carefully to one side. I hate him because he is constantly picking me up and moving me around like I don't matter.( . . . )

*This week, our common prompt comes from patesden. The illustration is by Rolf Winkler and comes from the story MUGEL THE GIANT.

The rain woke them.

Not the light rain, but the soaking, gasping rain, the rain that wet you to your skin, the rain that drenched the sudden clouds and overflowed like a river tipped out. The rain that filled the trees and dripped from the Spanish moss onto the graves below.

That woke them.

The first time I heard them, twilight sullen and dark in the rain, I had leapt from my perch on one of the headstones, hands outstretched, ready to -- something. Ready to do whatever it was that needed to be done.

But I was not needed. Though the cemetery was alive with hidden scratching and gnawing, rattling and sighing, the ground stayed smooth, undisturbed. The dead were not rising; they were merely restless. Woken.

By the time the sun shone through the moss, the graves were silent again.

And so was I. As the day grew hot and the sun burnt away the memory of the storms, I sat on a massive headstone crusted with red lichen, my knees drawn up, my wings hanging behind me, and watched tourists walk through the graveyard. They were like tacky flowers, the tourists, in a thousand different colors pulled from a faraway jungle. They didn’t even see me -- didn’t want to see me. Some of the graves were beautiful, topped with sad angels and hopeful cherubs, and these inspired murmured awe and digital flashes.

I inspired neither. I was the grave you did not step on.

( Read the rest . . .  )

As you probably know, Maggie, Brenna, and I hung out in Savannah, GA last week with six other YA writers. All of our combined awesomeness in one place was nearly too much for the time-space continuum to handle, but we (ad the universe) survived.

Here's proof!



That's Maggie (Emo Puppy), Brenna (Dysfunction Kitty), and Tessa (Blood Bunny) from left to right. Thanks to the wicked dawn_metcalf for the rocking paintings.

We laughed, talked writing, ate, made silly home videos, and had a BLAST.

I clutched the knife in my fist, hiding it in a fold of my coat. Wisps of spirits and pale white death shifted and spun out of my way like fog behind a chariot.

Down and down, through rooms of creatures who dove from me or ducked into shadows or knelt with their faces to the ground, down and down past hounds and cats and crows, I hurried. The weight of all the earth above settled onto me and soothed my frenetic pace so that when I took the final steps and stood in the white archway leading to her garden my breath was measured and my heart beat its agonizing, slow rhythm.

She sat in a reclining chair in butter-and-sunlight skirts. Her fingers moved delicately with needle and thread, stitching Hecate-only-knows into the folds and hems. Green grass, pink flowers and thin forever-saplings graced the garden, alive and glowing here as nowhere else in my domain. For her. Sunlight, unheard of in this realm, peered down through the long black shaft of castle above us, only a pinprick of white-blue sky, and somehow found her hair. A second chair waited for me, or for whomever made the leap to visit her, and a tiled table between was full with purple grapes and nectarines, olives, cheese, and wine. Tucked among the grapes was a large and shining pomegranate, uncut and whole, mocking me.

I longed to tear through its skin, digging my fingers into its flesh so that the seeds and blood spilled out. ( I would stain her silk and her skin with its sweet juice, and give the pips onto her tongue, and she would stay. )

The first time Emily saw Caleb, she was ten years old. He was digging in the sand at the municipal park near her house when a bigger boy tackled him and held him down in the muddy depression at the bottom of the slide.

“Don't,” Emily said, and when the other boy only grinned up at her, she stuck out her chin and shoved a handful of sand down the back of his jeans.

The second time Emily saw Caleb, he was standing in front of the Dairy Queen, trying to protect his ice cream cone from the same boy. This tormenter, it transpired, was Caleb's own brother, Irwin, a nasty piece of work. Eventually, he gained the ice cream, and Caleb sat alone on the curb. Emily had been about to start home with Deanie and Rose, her two best friends in the whole world, but first she went over and gave Caleb a piece of candy, which was wrapped in cellophane and shaped like a strawberry. He took it and his hand was sticky. Emily smiled and went home.

A week later, she was dead.( . . . )

It was May when my mother’s mouth disappeared. But it wasn’t as if we hadn’t been expecting if for awhile.

They called it Wondjini, I think because it looked good on the side of pill bottles. You know, Experil: indicated for Wondjini. Far sexier than an “itis” of some variety.

Everyone was really nice when Mom was first diagnosed. It wasn’t like when Maria’s father got hepatitis and everyone avoided her at school and wouldn’t shake her hand at Mass. That’s the great thing about Wondjini. It’s not a cover your mouth with a tissue sort of disease. It’s an everyone brings casseroles until you can’t eat them anymore disease.

When Mom first came back from the Wondjini clinic, she had a handful of beautiful pamphlets talking about how Wondjini doesn’t have to ruin your life and how treatments didn’t have to be invasive and a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t read. I was sitting at the dining room table, the backlit surface a soft green, Mom’s favorite, but my scrapbook stuff was blocking most of it.

“Can I have these when you’re done with them, Mom?” I asked, tapping the pamphlets.

Mom rubbed the skin at her temple and threw her purse down on the counter. “The what? Oh. What do you want those for?” She seemed to remember the scissors in my hand. She said again, “Oh. You can have them now.”

They had beautiful glossy photographs of healthy-looking men and women running with dogs and washing radioactively bright oranges and frolicking in the sort of perfect grass that is only achieved with a lot of raking and chemicals. If you took out the bit about Wondjini, they could’ve been pamphlets for a lot of things. Gym memberships. Couples therapy. Teeth whiteners.

( Read more . . .  )

I don't know what made me do it.

The giant puddle was like every puddle: a hole in the world reflecting back light and sky. I'd always loved them, been fascinated by them. Wanted to close my eyes and leap through into that mirror world. As a child, I would skim my fingers along the surface, distorting the reflection, and then sit back to watch it slowly, slowly right itself.

Tiergan Fitch used to push me into them when he found me poking around his family land. He patrolled it on a red dirt bike, lording around like a knight on a stallion, and I was the trespasser and thief. "Yo, Izzy, you like puddles so much, marry them," he'd say, chin lifted. He'd raise the pine staff he always carried and charge. His bike would veer close and I'd lose footing only to tumble back into the water. As he peddled off, he zigged and zagged to smash through every single other puddle.

I thought he was a heathen who hated water. Everyone else thought he was just a bully, until we were in sixth grade and Juliet Banks decided he was beautiful. She looked up his name in a baby name book and told all of us, "It means strong willed, so of course he can be difficult." Her lip gloss and eyeliner made her look older, and she started wearing real bras like the grown-ups wore, that she said her mama bought her at the mall. Soon all our friends were begging for push-ups and tinted lip gloss, and I was alone in my jeans and training bra thinking Tiergan was a dick.

It became a game. I'd creep into the woods after a rain, toes quiet in my sneakers, hair all pulled back to avoid snagging in the thin pine needles. The best puddles were along the hiking trails, since most of the forest floor was covered by years worth of soft, rotting needles and leaves. The air smelled better than peach cobbler, all clean and fresh and alive with rain, electricity, pine resin. If I was lucky, I'd find a boulder off the mountain, pocketed with tiny fresh water circles. I'd climb up and sit cross-legged in front of the best one, surrounded by cool, damp air and the pointed tips of the trees. Tiergan would have to get off his bike and come up on his own, get his hands all dirty against the rocks. He'd glare at me and reach down to scoop all the water out of my puddle.

Once when I'd just turned fifteen I yelled after him, "What's wrong with you?"

( His bike skidded to a halt and he didn't look back. )

Dante comes stomping and shivering in from night class. His hair is wet, pavement-black in the light from the overhead fixture. His eyes are heavily shadowed.

“I think I'm losing it,” he says.

The announcement is exhaustingly familiar, and Pinky doesn't answer.

The kitchen is too small for revelations, and he's her brother, not a convalescent patient or a child. He's smiling in that way he has—all teeth and gums and no particle of joy. The smile is a millimeter off from screaming.

But Dante is easily spooked. An alarmist by nature, he says this kind of thing all the time.

Pinky folds her hands on the table and stares down, feeling the words in her mouth. They pile up, getting jammed against her teeth.

She wants to say, How dramatic you are. She wants to tell him that bad genetics and bent neurotransmitters will only take a person so far. That last lurch into madness, you do it yourself. Their father, she is convinced, dove in headfirst. She has to believe it was this way, because without the reassurance of a clear-cut act of will, there is only madness and her brain, and nothing in between.( . . . )

*This week, our common prompt comes from Simon (prophet1). An account of the original mythology can be found here: Wondjina

It was Monday when they started digging my grave.

When I pulled down the driveway, I saw the first one, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair sticking to his foreheads, spade digging into the ground again and again. The edge of the grave was just on the other side of my property line, and not very big. And anyway, on Monday, the hole wasn’t big enough for me to be worried.

Tuesday, there were two of them when I came back from the office, my skin smelling like fabric softener and my breath like artificial mint. Their curls were matted to their heads with sweat as they dug, dug, dug, throwing clods of dry clay beside the hole. They stood up to their knees in the hole, which doesn’t sound very deep, but their knees were taller than most people’s.

By Wednesday, there were three of them, and they had been digging through the night. I had heard the scuff, scuff, scuff of their shovels outside my bedroom window as the blades bit into the dirt. I knotted my tie and tied my shoes and went to work in my office that was ten feet away from a window. On Wednesday afternoon, they threw my potted plants into the hole. The ones that sat outside my front door, that I’d gotten on sale at Home Depot. I mean, I couldn’t be sure they had taken them, but the plants were missing when I got home, and I knew the pots had been there when I left in the morning. But by now the hole was deep enough and the diggers were tall enough that I didn’t want to ask. Plus, it was just flowers. I’d only bought them to make the stairs look better for the party I’d thrown for the sales reps.

( Read More . . . )

Wow, you people are amazing. We've been arguing and fighting with each other for THREE DAYS now trying to pick all our favorite stories! (Maggie threatened us with a sword.)

And in the end, we've decided to name SIX runners-up because narrowing it down (without Maggie's sword) was just too tough. Runners-up, not only will you bathe in unending glory, you get to make US write about what you want us to write about. Each of you can comment (or email or pm) with your prompt, and over the next few months we'll tear into them. Prompts can be an image, story, or idea.

Without further ado (and in no particular order):

annemariewrites
ravelda
prophet1
patesden
Chelle
Tanita

Congratulations folks!!!

Of course, we know you really want to know where the ARC of Shiver and awesome MF totebag are headed.

( ................. )

Thanks to everyone who participated. Reading the stories and poems was a lot of fun.

Don't forget! Today's the last day to enter our awesome anniversary contest!!!

The prompt is garnering lots of lovely entries! Go! Be inspired!



(Really, as long as it's in my inbox by the time I get to work tomorrow morning, at 8am Central time, you're golden.)

"Does the Devil always smoke?"

He curved his thin lips into a smile and tapped the cigarette against the edge of the round wrought iron table. "You're wasting time."

The matching iron chair cut into my back as I leaned away from him. "It's mine to waste."

"True."

I waited. The cafe crowd bustled around us, my fellow wait staff hurrying with huge cappucino mugs spilling over with froth, spring-green salads with tofu, and hard iced teas. They didn't notice that I'd sat down across from a customer. I'm not sure they'd even noticed him. Or the quiet table in the center of lunch rush, trapped in a bubble of thick, molasses sunlight. Which the Devil proceeded to ruin with his noxious cloud of smoke.

He sighed, smoke curling in several long tendrils out through his perfectly white teeth. "Yes. I always smoke. It's the sexiest thing humans have invented since the Pear of Anguish." To prove it, he slid his long fingers down the shaft of the cigarette and blew a long stream of silky gray. "A cigarette in the right hands can dazzle weak minds for hours. You'll stare at my lips and fingers while I do anything else l like."

"Plus it kills people and is terribly addictive."

"There is also that."

I studied him, tried to decipher the color of his eyes and the shape of his jaw, but it was difficult to focus. I tightened my fingers around the brim of his hat, knowing if I loosened my hold, he'd snatch us both. "When will I die?" I asked, to see if he would lie again.

"I can't answer that." The Devil tapped ash from the cigarette again. As if I was boring him.

This was not my kind of game. It never had been. But I'd never expected when I got to work this morning that I would bend over to pick up a hat being tossed over tables by the wind, and realize its owner was the Devil. The silk fedora snapped with energy, and I'd just known, like you know your feet will hit the ground when you roll out of bed. Before I'd always had days of warning that he was close on my heels.

"How did you sneak so quietly this time?" I whispered. He shouldn't have heard it in the late summer afternoon. Not over all the conversation and blaring traffic.

His glance slid down to the fedora. A cloud slipped over the sun and in the sudden shadow I saw his face clearly. Sharp, plain features, endless gray eyes.

I had to glance away until the sun warmed my cheek again.

"You wanted me to find you," he answered. His hand lay on the table, palm up. "Come home, Kora."

"I don't have to, yet."

"But you want to. I want you to."

"You don't own me."

"Is that your last question?"

"It isn't a question." I shoved away from the table, and the iron chair crashed to the ground.

He was there, in front of me, bursting the bubble of sunlight so all the cafe went still, staring at our argument. Mouths parts, eyes wide, two of the waitresses who'd known me all summer, but not known me at all, stepped forward.

The Devil put his lips against mine, gently, gently, tasting of smoke and graveyards and narcissus petals.

When I pushed away, he let me. His smile curved slowly, and smoke leaking thick and lovely out of the corner of his mouth, even though the cigarette was long forgotten.

I reached out and fanned my fingers through it. The cold, shadowy smoke of Hades. It tingled, and burned at once, and the Devil closed his eyes.

Jamming his hat on my head, I ran, and vanished into the crowd.



image by nils.alsleben

Hey everybody!

Don't forget our prompt contest is going on! You can win awesome stuff, and all you need to do is write a story based on our prompt, then post a link to it in the comments here or in the original post!

All the details are behind the cut (and so is the prompt again).

You have through next Tuesday, May 12th!

( HAVE FUN! )

There's this dream I have sometimes:

I'm lying on my back. It's night and I'm adrift, floating down a river that smells like blood, banks cluttered with weeds and bones. The raft is old, the river boils red. It leaks up between the boards, soaking through my clothes, so warm I think I'll scream. One by one, the stars go out.

This town is sick. It lets bad, sick things happen when it ought to be trying to stop them. I always knew that, but never really understood it. When you're little, your town is just a town.

From the porch, I watched the world unravel. People walking around like zombies, all numb and dumb and stupid. If some degenerate wants to go on a shooting spree or cook drugs in some cheap motel room, they let it happen. Stealing cars? No problem.

And if you happen to get caught in the middle, they might even blame you. If you wind up in a gas station hold-up, get shot, get dead, it might be your fault, no matter how wrong, no matter how random. And if you left your daughter behind—well, what the hell? It was her fault, too.( . . . )

Now with SIX fresh, original pieces of fiction EVERY MONTH!

Week one: Brenna, also known as Disfunctional Spice, will wow us!

Week two: Tessa, aka Gory Spice, will horrify us!

Week three: Maggie, hailed as Emo Spice, will make us cry like babies!

Week four: We'll all participate in a common prompt (Mon, Wed, and Fri) chosen by YOU dear watchers.

On the occasional off week we'll take a chance to recuperate and make you write instead! Look for more frequent watcher prompts, and we want to try and do at least one quarterly give-away.


Year Two starts next week. Thanks to everyone for making this first year so much fun!!!


image from Thor I#200-201 (June-July, 1972) - Gerry Conway & Stan Lee (#200) (writers), John Buscema (pencils), John Verpoorten (#200) & Jim Mooney (#201) (inks), Stan Lee (editor)

In honor of our One Year Anniversary, we're having a Watcher Prompt Contest!

The rules are the same as before, with one small addition. But first I'm going to tell you the PRIZES because they rule. (Seriously - I asked Maggie and Brenna if I could enter. They said no.)

Our Grand Prize Winner will receive:

- his or her choice of a tee shirt or tote bag from our Merry Fates Shop (I have a tote and it is huge and durable. I love it.)

AND

- a signed ARC of SHIVER by our own Maggie Stiefvater! Maggie just got her hands on this hot items, and wow are they cool. SHIVER comes out in August, so our winner will be three months ahead of the crowd! 


We'll also choose a few runners-up, who will receive massive amounts of GLORY and accolades. We'll ask them to pick common prompts for us - no topic, story, or image is off limits!

Here are the rules:

1) use the prompt to write a story. It can be as short or as long as you like.

2) post it in your blog, and then link to it in the comments to this post, or one of the reminder posts.

3) For your story, you get one entry into the contest. HOWEVER, if after posting your story, you go back through the MF stories and comment to one (or many) telling us what you liked about it, we'll give you ANOTHER entry to win the Grand Prize!

That's it! Have fun!

EDIT:  You do not have to be a Watcher to enter - you just have to write a story and make sure we have your lj name or real name!  If we don't know who you are, there can be no GLORY!

The deadline is May 12th, by midnight!

Here's the prompt, ( behind the cut! )