Welcome to Fantasy Friday! Every week, you are invited to write and post anything having to do with fantasy, science fiction, etc., right here in the comments. Like, what’s your favorite Recycled SF Plot episode? Or, your thoughts on this week’s selection of the 85 Weirdest over at WeirdTales.net. Perhaps you have some thoughts on last week’s Torchwood finale or Doctor Who series premiere? Would you like to wow us with a bit from your latest work in progress? Or, really, blog about anything at all.
At 5 p.m. PST today, if we’ve got at least ten participants, we’ll choose the day’s most entertaining writer and PayPal them $10 on the spot. Go start your weekend off with a cold one on us! (Minors, make that a couple of hot chocolates.)
P.S. Don’t forget to enter our other contest! You could win a copy of Fangland (and possibly some other mystery prizes).
1 • Gloria Weber said:
April 11th, 2008 at 8:27 am, permalink
The following work follows the formula for my toddler’s favorite book, slightly altered. Feel free to imagine the pictures…
This is Dave.
This is the grave
that Dave bought.
This is the shovel,
all dirty and grimy,
that dug in the grave
that Dave bought.
These are the worms,
all squirmy and slimy,
that splattered against the shovel,
all dirty and grimy,
that dug in the grave
that Dave bought.
This is the corpse,
all decomposed and limey,
the worms crawled on it,
all squirmy and slimy,
they splattered against the shovel,
all dirty and grimy,
that dug in the grave
that Dave bought.
This is the ritual,
cast upon flesh and bone,
it rose the body,
it started with a moan,
from the corpse,
all decomposed and limey,
with worms crawling on it,
all squirmy and slimy,
they had splatter on the shovel,
that was all dirty and grimy,
all from the grave
that Dave bought.
Here is a zombie,
reanimated,
and far from handsome.
A zombie by
magic.
How freaking awesome!
The zombie lurched for Dave,
all moany-groany and head to feet grimy
and super strongy and wormy parts slimy
and blood lusty and dead skin all limey.
This is Dave.
This is the grave
that Dave bought.
Poor Dave.
2 • Hallgerd said:
April 11th, 2008 at 8:27 am, permalink
My sister is dreaming of fish again. I can smell them.
Since They came we share a space with no window, with a yellow line of light that marks a floorboard overhead. We watch that line of light. We keep our eyes open in the dark in case it comes again unexpectedly. In case They find us.
Every night since we hid here – and all day too sometimes, my sister lies there on the floor with her eyes closed, suffering, remembering. I know when she sleeps for a film of water appears at her lips, pours over and the first fish slips out to die in a fold of her nightdress or under her buckled arms.
It was a new horror at first when it happened. I felt the dark walls rush in and almost – almost – screamed. But she wakes each morning with a little less emptiness in her eyes than the night before, a little more life. I said to her that in this darkness maybe our thoughts have become real. That maybe she has found a way to jettison through metaphor what has happened to us. She looked frightened. “You’re dreaming,” she said and I said “probably”. This strangeness helps her survive — leave it at that.
I lie beside her in the damp with my hands over my eyes so I can’t see the fish slide out of her, alive but already decomposing. She will be all right, I think, my little sister. She will get through this. I’m not sure about myself. There is death swimming in me but I’m stoppered tight. I’m a bottle of rotting memories, corrosive and unreleased.
3 • Katherine Sparrow said:
April 11th, 2008 at 12:27 pm, permalink
Big ups to Weird Tales for including Roald Dahl and Madeleine L’Engle in the 85 weirdest. I think kids books are expected to be a little weird, or given more leeway to be fantastic and strange, but I think Dahl and L’Engle are both weird weird weird.
I’m thinking of the novella “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” by Dahl where in the middle of the story the narrator finds a story written by a man who interviewed an Indian man who could bike with his head bound in gauze. And then follows ten or so pages of exacting scientific detail about how to do this. The story returns to the narrator who goes about doing just this, ie staring at the backs of cards for fifteen years and many, many pages. Structurally, it’s story, within a story, telling someone else’s story is weird. Plotwise, it should be very boring, but it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.
I’m also thinking of L’Engle’s “A Ring of Endless Light” one of the most eroticized young adult novels I know of. Not only is the protag involved with three different boys, she is also riding dolphins all over the place who she has a psychic-like connection with. All of this is placed within L’Engle’s Christian-centered world, which makes it, yep, super-weird, and that book isn’t even part of her scifi oeuvre.
4 • J M McDermott said:
April 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm, permalink
“The solstice flies only lived for one, brief day in winter. Their razor-sharp pincers cut through the ice, and they burst into the gray sky like giant snowflakes falling in the wrong direction.
We catch as many as we can in nets. We can’t catch all of them, which I guess is a good thing because then we wouldn’t have them the next year. The birds of the labyrinth cluster around the pools and lakes, waiting for the one day when the solstice flies emerge from the frozen water.
They aren’t very big, when you smash them up. Alive, they’re about as large as your palm. But, they’re thin and mostly made of chitin razors and paper-thin wings. You can catch dozens of them – hundreds of them – and smash them up into a paste and cook them into a kind of crunchy flatbread. It barely counted as a meal.
Still, in the wintertime, every little bit helps.”
Will Fantasy Magazine buy it when I’m done writing it?
Who knows. Maybe, though, it will help qualify me for the next 15 spots at Weird Tales, when they turn 100 in 15 years.
Who will be in the next fifteen, I ask? Will it be you?
5 • ChiaLynn said:
April 11th, 2008 at 6:51 pm, permalink
Every week, I think I’ll enter, and nearly every week, I remember sometime after 5 PM. (The other weeks, I remember Saturday morning. Or sometimes Sunday.) Today, though, I’ve remembered, and remembering, I’ll write.
I heard her whimpering before my key entered the lock. A chain jangled on the other side of the door. “Randy?” she whispered. “Is that you?”
“You know it is, Sirin. Was that the security chain? Did you just fasten it?”
“Yes.”
I sighed. “Come on, Sirin. Open up.”
“Ask me,” she said.
“Sirin, this is silly. It’s my house. Just open the door.”
“Please, Randy. Please. Ask me.”
I considered slamming my shoulder into the door – imagined the old door frame splintering, the screws holding the chain in place tearing out of the wood, the tears and terror in Sirin’s eyes… No. I wouldn’t do that to her, however much I might have liked to.
“Fine,” I said. “Please, let me in.”
The chain clicked against its tracks. A moment later, the door swung open. Sirin was already retreating. She huddled into a corner of the couch, curled into a fetal ball and wrapped in one of my old sweaters. I checked the thermostat. Eighty-three degrees. I stripped to a t-shirt when I came into the house. Sirin was always cold.
“Did you bring me anything?” she asked.
“Some wine,” I said. “I’ve got tortellini for dinner, and I got some of that dark chocolate you like.”
She moaned. “I’m sorry, Randy,” she said. “But it isn’t enough. I’m so hungry.”
“I’m so hungry.” She was always hungry. Always cold. Since the night she arrived on my doorstep, shivering in her thin, lavender dress, her green eyes welling with tears. “Please,” she’d whispered then. “Please let me in. I’m so cold, and I have nowhere else to go.” What could I do? She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I let her in. I let her in, but I couldn’t let her feed.
6 • ChiaLynn said:
April 11th, 2008 at 6:56 pm, permalink
Hallgerd – “My sister is dreaming of fish again. I can smell them” is one of the best first lines I’ve ever read.
Katherine – Neil Gaiman said awhile back on his blog (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/at-end-of-book.html )that a reviewer for Anansi Boys said: “Anansi Boys is one of Neil Gaiman’s books for grown-ups, which means that it’s a lot less ruthless than the material he produces for children.” Dahl was ruthless, too. I think too many people forget what a wonderful, strange and terrifying time childhood really is – which means we’re even more lucky to have a few writers who remember it.