Ginger pressed her finger in the ink, and marked an X over the MF17 button on the control panel. The creature flew raging in, grey and black flesh of varying transparency and solidity, from near fluid to stony weight. Its eyes caught the X, as she wished, and fell upon the button.

The doors that it opened as the creature, sliding walls like elevator doors, domes of garden arenas, smells of water on spicy leaves and spindly stems. Stars flicked through the lap of the sun’s seamless rays.

Ginger walked a path into the curiously intricate maze, her feet sinking into the soft dust with each step.

2023/01/17 #DailyWrittenOOM

Crystal shank took the beaten road, and the motorhome followed at a nomadic pace. Treble the danger of sliding rocks, to and fro like the sliders on a sound control board, this was the heritage of the viper’s path, and the thirst dusted plain way. Without a doubt she ran after the glistening man, who turned and regarded her between pillars of profound stone.

The crown that swept with the swallows in the coastal place where ground and air met, that was the sun of many flies that feasted with the larger scavengers, and brought things to their dens. The man who regarded her had many, masked with faces of flies, rank on rank in their swarm. She went with him, and he turned with her along the curve of a gleaming scimitar blade.

Then came the point, and the mountain surrounded by sunlit and sunburnt shadow. There sat the cottage, the door open as the mouth of a baby bird in a thatch nest. A hut, a hovel, but in the darkness thereof there sat a glitter, a hint of crystal, and the softer gleam, the hem of a skirt.

2023/01/16 #DailyWrittenOOM

A gravelly voice admitted that the day was cool in the sun, while the voice of piping sparrows rode the salt in the air between the sharp and polished leaves. Pages turned in the portico, where the windows looked in and out with listless abandon, polished as the leaves that crowned the patch of clear air around the structure.

Where the crows found Jane, there were left some scraps of bold leather, and a shaggy ruff of troglodyte pageantry. Two coins were keen eyes to find these and other things, looking this way and that, flashing as they turned, flat opaque spectacles. The hands that made the clippers clip through the polished leaves felt the hard handles, and the sun that burnt through the cool when the day was above the trees.

This very pitcher was poured out on the ground there, where they brought Jane that day, and the other day when the trees’ ropy roots found her. A snappish hagfish dropped from the stream brought a sack lunch which I and you forgot. This lunch is in a solid basket, and has a clock-coloured bow; let us not forget it, next time we come.

2023/01/15 #DailyWrittenOOM

We celebrated my mother’s birthday today, and she picked a theme for the year for her to focus on, which is “surrender”. I remember someone saying that a certain group were resistant to someone’s preaching (vague memory, haha), because he used the term “surrender to Christ”, and they had been taught never to surrender.

It seems to me the same people would accept the same or similar message more readily than others if it had been put as “obey Christ”, as they would have been taught to strictly and fervently obey their leader, or “sacrifice your own desires for those of Christ your leader”. He is their one rightful leader, all others are traitors and impostors.

They are at fault in being resistant to surrender: it is false as the pagan idea that all struggle, strife, and fighting is evil and fleshly, the idea that one should always surrender. Pagan false morality tends to look at positive vs. negative rather than at fitting vs. unfitting: the truth as it is written is, “There is a time for every purpose under heaven”.

When you are on the wrong side, following the wrong leader, surrender and changing sides is noble, courageous, self-sacrificing; when you are on the right side, following a faithful leader, surrendering the cause and changing sides is traitorous, cowardly, and selfish. (And of course the principles of the concepts of surrender wouldn’t necessarily apply to individual cases of surrender in individual fights).

2023/01/14 #SabbathPosts

Create, with fire on ten, with driven fire, and the knell of fire; dimming the shapes, the parted shapes and sharpened forking tongues, dreams of feathering blades in the belly of the body. Right fan of left lined framed wind, winding cords of blowing, knotted staves of pounding thrum.

Set up the trill of magnificent winters, never were the standards so ranged, the simmering so tight and tangy, the knife so significant where it lies. Tripled ardour in the set arches, ribbed tunnels under the land and sky; knotted staves take the beating from the stripes of light and shadow under the half tunnelled ways; drag the dream to the brink, and fuel the fire with glittering coals.

2023/01/13 #DailyWrittenOOM

Martha heard the telephone ring, but when she lifted it from the hook, the little black phone writhed and twisted like a black ferret, and vibrated with a resonant, whining snarl; she flung the phone down on the counter.

She went to the sink to dash some cold water on her face, but when she turned on the tap the faucet shook, and vomited out steaming black sludge.

After this second fright, she ran to leave the house: but when she reached for the door-knob, the metal unzipped into toothed jaws which barked fiercely at her.

With a sad moan, she fled to the couch, and wrapped herself in a blanket.

Some moments later, she was startled when the door opened, and her husband stepped in with a crackle of some strange energy.

“Ah, good,” he said, clearly relieved to see her.

“Oh, Dear,” she said (saying two things at once), “what has been happening? It was horrid…”

“Yes, well, there was a certain demonic beast whelp who had just cast a curse that anything electrically conductive you touched would soon shock and kill you. I’ve just taken care of the little devil,” (he brushed a bit of ashes from his coat) “but I had our gremlin, Skinley, keep you from touching anything conductive meanwhile.”

Skinley stepped out from behind a table-leg: his membranous wings drooped, as well as the hooked nose and elephant grey skin of his face. The tip of his wand was still red hot. Martha knitted her brows.

“Couldn’t he have just told me?”

“You would have died from the curse then; it was a cunning whelp,” her husband said.

“Oh.”

She couldn’t bear Skinley’s big, sad eyes any longer, and beckoned him to receive a hug and be comforted. In the process she received a burn from his still hot wand on her cheek.

“Ow! Careful with that, buddy,” she said. “And thank you for saving my life, little friend.”

2023/01/12 #DailyWrittenOOM

A thought inspired by a phrase my brother said in a conversation (“some chaos in the back end”) – humanoid robots of the retro futuristic sort, with old-fashioned monitor type screens for their heads, which normally show a person or person’s face, or whatever the robot is talking about.

But one robot is different: whether a glitch caused by some variation of “spirit”, or simply a display of that spiritual variation, it displays static, and its vocalisations are also static. The static may vary in intensity for various reasons, expressive or unknown. It flickers black at times, as if blinking; flickering top down normally, or contracting to a point if more emphatic (like turning off and back on again). One of its hands it does not use, except at certain very specific times, which many people do not know about.

I imagine it sitting in a dark room, with the static going on and on.

2023/01/11 #DailyWrittenOOM