First seen on the Space Trash Blog.
Valentine's colours (Get Inspired, week 7)
I hate those pink and white balloons in the stores around Valentine's Day. They always remind me of blood on the snow.
I was trying to run, but the snow was so deep that all I was doing was exhausting myself. Now, that memory feels like one of those dreams where you can't move, and all I really have are flashes; the metallic taste in the back of my throat; the dark splashes that could have been shadows, but were my twin's blood; and the sound of my lungs clawing for air.
I'd found the note in her schoolbag. An anti-Valentine, if you like. It had probably seemed funny to whoever had stuck it in there, because I was the only one who knew that Carrie had been cutting herself for months. It was the only outlet she had for the defiance, the anger, and the bone-deep exhaustion that she sometimes showed only to me, her brother. Everyone else, because my sister should have been in goddamn Hollywood, just thought she had a thing for retro bangles to the elbows.
By the time I finally found her, she'd stopped bleeding. Because we were both just fourteen when she died, I didn't go to jail for what I did to that boy. It would have been a waste of time, anyway. I know what I did was wrong, and I don't regret it.
Yes, I am a real cynic when it comes to Valentine's Day. At best, it's a way for Hallmark to make money. At worst, it could be renamed Singles' Awareness Day. Like diamond engagement rings, to me it feels like a 'buy me things to prove you love me' exercise. While I'm fully aware this is a really unpopular viewpoint, if you need diamonds and pink bows to prove you love someone, you may have bigger relationship issues.
First seen on the Space Trash Blog.
Commuting. Always a problem (Get Inspired, week 6)
Ever had to queue for a bus while the Wild Hunt rides through? Not a metaphor.
They say that if you can't see the Hunt, the Hunt will ignore you, but there's only so much interest I can pretend in Facebook at the best of times. Even when I really need an excuse not to get chatted at by the guy ahead of me who inflicts his conversation on everyone unfortunate enough to get within range. Even when not seeing the things I'm not supposed to be able to see has saved me thousands in medical bills.
While that guy really does annoy me, I'm not sure he deserved the sword stroke that lopped the bald top of his head off like the top off an egg, leaving a gray fringe of hair around exposed gray matter.
The moment of frozen shock saved me, because I blinked, and the man ahead of me was perfectly whole again, the undoubtedly girly scream still trapped in my throat. Unfortunately, blinking hadn't made the hunter who had coalesced out of the half-seen, half-felt stream of shapes whirling around and through the bus exchange and the buses any less solid. If anything, he and the Hunt were becoming more real by the second, while the hunched shapes of my fellow commuters drained of colour around me.
The flat of the sword was very real under my chin, reeking and sticky with blood, forcing my head up to meet the narrow stare of the rider. It certainly felt solid. Unlike the eyes of the hunter looming over me, which were empty holes in his head.
"As you wish, so mote it be, my lord, Lucas Main, otherwise Lugh ap Gywn," he said. "The most determined of us can only deny our true selves for so long."
Like almost everyone with a full time day job, I commute. Like most people commuting on public transit, I've occasionally entertained less-than-charitable thoughts about idiots who will not STFU, or who really think that their testicles are so impressive they require them to spread their knees across three seats. This one showed up in my head when I was standing amid my fellow zombies commuters, watching the crescent moon over the trees, and thinking about Celtic myths, because by and large those are preferable to thinking about Monday in the office.
First seen on the Space Trash blog.
What they don't tell you about biometrics (Get Inspired, week 5)
My boss was lying on the floor. Not a problem in and of itself; given the layers of security on this station, it should be reasonably unlikely that anyone who didn't know her would be in a position to report her to the powers that be.
The pool of blood and the missing hand, on the other hand, were problems, and unfortunately they were all mine.
I rechecked my helmet display, admiring the clueless series of green reads. Whatever or whoever was in here collecting body parts was apparently something completely outside our security program's experience. It seemed like a lot to expect that my heads-up display wouldn't be equally clueless if my mystery guest decided to add my head to their collection.
Happily, unlike my very ex-boss, neither my head, my hands, or anything else I need to do my job are vital to getting into anything important. I'm a firm believer in the first rule of biometrics: never use a part for identification you can't do without. I slid out of my boss's office, heading for the only thing on this station worth this much trouble, carrying the largest bit of my own personal collection out and ready for use.
My name is Shayanna Willow Anstrim, because three of my parental units were dancers. I chose the Special Forces, instead.
Believe it or not, this snippet showed up in my head by way of my job. I work for a financial institution, and there's currently a lot of noise about biometric identification being the wave of the future. The largest part of the enthusiasm sounds rather like 'because there's no way some idiot can forget their own fingerprint'.
The flipside to that is, to my sci-fi inclined mind, that the future of the annoying bastards who currently only hack files for passwords, birth dates or PINs, will likely at some point progress to hacking fingers, or eyeballs, or whatever else secures something they want badly enough.
