#fantastical fiction

[sagehills]

List of tags for Sagehills: "https://www.tumblr.com/sagehills/tagged/fantastical%20fiction"

#human dorks

#life hacks

#relationship tips

#world of color: hope posting, faith in humanity

#glimpses of starlight: posts I want to show myself and children as emblematic of the good old days

#fantastical fiction: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Fairy Tales respun

#med patient stories

#history: fun facts, of course

#a cabin of my own

#mundo para vos: beautiful sights of this world

#slice of life

#festival_ani

#reflected_meteor_streak: that art that feels like “immortalizations of joy” : reflected%20meteor%20streak

#moondust ions: ethereal night

#tea_shop_lee

#tool_sites

#beewing veil: one-of-a-kind, delicate crafts

#milky way dress: unique crafts and design break downs

#deextinction #cottage_plachenta: those adorable boys in homely aesthetic #depthless_blue_sky: emotional scenes form stories or games

#masterpost_library

Fandom tags:

#yuurivoice

#dpxdc #bat family

[darkstoryspinner]

Bluebeard's Kingdom

Bonnie Moreland, flickr I must away from him under cover of the wood, away from his towering presence and greedy eyes, away from what I have undertaken to see and point out. My sisters call to me from the plains and their cries are plaintive, knowing, wise. I must away from him before he beats me for taking the bleeding key, the blood of women slain behind his door. “You are forbidden,” he has…

[sagehills]

If one day humanity leaves this earth, I hope that this story goes with us.

The Cindy Masterpost

I’ll edit and reblog this with updates as I post new bits of the Cinderella story I’m working on, but for now, here are all the current chapters out:

Part One (In Which Things Would Be Simpler If The Prince Was A Horny Piece of Shit)

Part Two (In Which No Rats Were Harmed In The Making Of These Horses)

Part Three (The OG post which technically is kind of told out of order because there’s a reblog and like, look, I could see this was becoming a thing, but I didn’t think it would be a thing-thing but now it’s a thing-thing and I have to deal with it. I mean I’m writing a masterpost for cryin’ out loud)

Part Four (In Which Cindy and the Fairy Godmother Run from the Cops)

Part Five (In Which The Prince Begins His Investigation While The Narrator yells About Foot Fetishes Because look I’m sick of that joke I’m SO FUCKING SICK of that joke it’s so fucking unoriginal.)

Part Six  (In which we meet The Queen because fuck you she was alive in the Rogers and Hammerstein version)

Part Seven (In which news of the slipper is spread throughout the kingdom and the narrator talks about this one time when they passed out at a Dickens fair and that’s totally definitely relevant.)

Part Eight (In Which the narrator wants to include more slapstick but is also wary about all the implications with regards to class differences and also the slipper is a non-euclidean object which defies all rules of mass and physics.)

Part Nine (In which Cindy is every drunk girl who has ever comforted you in a bar or club bathroom)

Part Ten (In which Cindy has no interest in being that wife chained up in the attic in Jane Eyre)

Part Eleven (In which tasty pies are consumed and also maybe the slipper fits someone or whatever)

Part Twelve (In which we meet the parents)

Part Thirteen (In which Cindy is going to be okay but also it’s not a fairy tale unless the ending has at least a little bit of threatening ambiguity towards the audience)

UPDATE: The story is now complete, and uploaded to AO3!!

UPDATE: There have been several specially requested chapters that are now included here:

Smoky Tea: An expansion on the first meeting of the King and Queen.

Ball’s In Your Court: Further notes on the King and Queen’s romance

Orphan Tears: A Fairy Godmother-centric paralogue.

The Hunt: A short conversation between Cindy and the King

[bebx]

me reading smut and calculating in my head the positions the characters are in

[pascalepalaces]

"The Accident" in Crow & Cross Keys:

content warning: discussion of suicide

It was as he was slumped over the steering wheel that Frederick scratched at his collarbone for the hundredth time that day. The gift he was wearing was too appropriately from his mother; though it looked very warm, he knew how prickly it felt. At home he’d pull it off, ask his wife for her hot apple cider. The day’s burden hadn’t been the conference, really; it was this drive to, now from, the building at the other end of the city. It was a busy hour and he was stuck, yet again, in the slug of traffic.

He was somewhat stuck, too, in his petty grumpiness. He was forgetting that he’d known much greyer days—that if anything, this Tuesday had only been off-white. That was what was showing in the clouds, in the way that the sky seemed to be covered in craft paste: the city was dim, but there had been no rain. Compressed in his small Peugeot, though, Frederick had sweat forming in his underarms.

He cursed when the Volkswagen ahead made a stop, blocking the street unreasonably like a kidney stone. He braked and hit the horn; others also did the same, and the sounds of displeasure built up like grimy pus. The guilty driver stuck his head out of his window, yelling already—but Frederick saw, after a few moments, that he wasn’t at all addressing the street.

He followed the man’s attention towards the park, which faced north, and noticed the clumps of people forming on the thin and pale lawn. The crowd was all at once staring toward the cliff; Frederick focused to see over them and into the horizon, where the sky was finally ripping open. He spotted the man climbing over the fence, and his heart sunk to the brake pedal. 

He had climbed a fence of his own, once. On that awful spring night, almost two decades prior, he’d dangled a foot and his life off of the Hersenkam Bridge, in Antwerp. Thanks to the interference of another, however, his failure to jump had signified the last major failure of his life. He parked his car in the traffic as he thought of the near incident, and he pulled his heart all the way up. He had to be brave, now, or it’d be this poor stranger who’d be sinking. 

The cool breeze shocked his skin as he stepped to the sidewalk. The air was haunted by cigarette smoke; this slum, in particular, smelled most of all like death. It was worse as Frederick entered the park and jogged on the stone. 

“I’ve got it,” he yelled, approaching the cliff. “Somebody ring the police. I’ll keep him at bay.”

The crowd obeyed, stagnant. Sure, they feared death enough to worry for the approacher, but they likely dreaded it too hard to ever approach, themselves.

Frederick wiped the sweat from his cheeks once he’d stopped. The rabid waves below were blasting him with cold air, which felt good on his inflamed face. He leaned over the flat metal and looked over the man on the other side; though they were close, now, the stranger did not acknowledge Frederick. His arms clutching at the black bars behind his back, he stared only forward. He looked to be in his twenties: pale, flushed skin, a raging head of auburn hair. 

“Son? Hello,” Frederick tried. “What’s your name?” 

The boy gathered his tears, and then something else, not quite as identifiable.

 “Ansel,” he groaned.

“Hi, Ansel. I’m Fred,” Frederick spoke again, running his hands atop the cold metal. “I’ll be very simple about this. I don’t want to ask why you’re here, so don’t worry about all that. Okay? I want to tell you why I’m here.”

Ansel shied his head around. His pale blue eyes limped all over Frederick’s face, as if in judgment. Eventually, they fell into his eyes. 

“I can’t not think about it,” he spoke.

“What?” 

“That my life’s nothing.” His face was drooping like a sad sack of blood. “My soul is too tired.”

Ansel’s words weighed further on Frederick. He knew he shouldn’t show it. 

“The soul doesn’t get tired,” he said.

“Huh?” 

“There’s no such thing as a tired soul. An unhappy one,” Frederick’s hands trembled as he thought back to his time in the facility, to the things he’d been told.

“I don’t understand.”

“Souls are made of pure, vibrating joy,” Frederick said. “It’s our souls that make us want to live in the world.” His hands shook with more violence, yet he assured himself it was due to that vibrating power.

“I don’t—”

“The mind is what gets sick. Sick minds cover our souls over with dust and dirt. But that can all be swept away. It just takes some effort.”

Yet his throat turned to ash as Ansel stared back at the water. He probably wouldn’t have believed the words, either, at his deadliest point. These were only words. They were promises from a stranger. A grey, misty truth was now encircling him.

And, before he’d entirely realized it, Frederick was clasping the top of the fence with both hands, which were quivering further under the weight of the decision. He placed a foot on the bottom rung, lifted himself upwards; his heart was heaving. He raised one stiff leg over the top of the fence— another—and it felt like a plummet as he lowered himself. With sweaty hands, he clutched the cold posts now behind him, too. Pieces of his insides were ricocheting all over his body. 

The edge was so close, the water so far down—yet, somehow, the salty taste of the air overwhelmed him already. The glassy blue waves below were curving and sinking, too, like they were trying to grab at him. Frederick felt a crashing chill as he watched them, and yet it was almost thrilling. His heavy, sinking feeling was increasing, but it was filling him whole. A seagull as white as the sky passed over the water, and as it was only as it started to cry that he remembered what he’d meant to do.

“Now, the reason that I’m here,” he coughed, his head sticky with mud. His heart thrashed when he turned to Ansel, again; the boy’s sunken, watery eyes looked too much like the water below. “I was in this position before,” he managed. “At your age.”

“You’re lying,” Ansel said.

“No. I was ready to give up, because I thought that I had nothing left. And it was true. I had nobody.”

Ansel withered.

“But it made me realize that I had nothing to lose if I took another chance,” Frederick continued, feeling sticky in his stomach, now, and in his legs. “I agreed to take just one more. It was at my disposal. Now, I have a nice job. I have a wonderful wife, and two boys. So, this,” he nodded his head towards the water, “it just no longer tempts me.” 

Ansel blinked slowly, at that, and then he turned his gaze back over the fence—which gave Frederick a ring of hope. He looked over too for a moment, then another few: a new crop of people had cultivated on the grass, staring at them with scarecrow eyes. 

“You’re telling the truth?” Ansel muttered, his grip on the fence tightening. His voice was strained, which only meant that something in him was fighting and alive.

“Of course,” Frederick said.

The screeching sirens were approaching harder, too. Ansel’s eyebrows dipped, then curved.

“What are their names?” he asked Frederick.

“Huh?”

“Your family. Tell me about them.”

Frederick understood, finally, and he smiled vigorously. He’d have him, soon. He’d reel him back to land, like fish on a hook.  

It was only a moment later that he felt a hook had entered his own brain, had lobotomised him.

Ansel watched Frederick, with life in his eyes, as he awaited his simple answer—yet Frederick was waiting alongside him. The man was paralyzed, almost—though, internally, he was spastic and grabbing at the air for words that seemed to have evaporated. He became only concerned for himself. Any man would know the name of his wife, of course. Of his own children. He’d remember their faces. 

Heaving the increasingly salty air, Frederick was sure that everything would return to him, within only a few moments—but the moments left with increasing force. Soon, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever had children, or even a wife. He supposed that he didn’t. He’d been mistaken…

“Oh my god,” Ansel’s voice shook Frederick out of his mind, or his lack thereof. The boy’s face had been re-ignited with dread. His eyes had flatlined. “You are lying,” he spat.

“Wait,” Frederick struggled. He was too dizzy.

Ansel’s face screwed downwards, then, and he made the ugliest whimper that Frederick had ever heard. Such a sound could only signify death. 

“Oh, god,” Ansel repeated. 

Frederick was greeted that evening by the smell of burnt chicken, the noises of Nikolas and Emeric throughout the halls. 

“Darling?” Mary called, from the living room.

Frederick let down his briefcase. “Yes,” he said. 

“I’ve been worried.”

Frederick went to her, coming up beside the brown leather couch. She’d been sitting, her wavy black hair draped over a book. She looked up at him and smiled.

In the fourteen years that Frederick had known her, Mary’s smile had never burnt out a touch. Before his death, her father had warned him that many had looked down on her for it; she’d grinned, always, at all of the homeless people on the street, at every rude client or stranger. She was still always joy and giggles, in their home: whenever she played with her children, for instance, or every time she and Frederick tried for another.

Frederick didn’t mind, too much, if people believed Mary was odd, or even if she was. Her smile, as always, brought him a luminous joy—even if no flame would be catching tonight. 

“Work kept me,” he told her.

“You’re starving.” She put her book down on the couch. “Let me—”

“No. I’m tired,” he said. His mouth and throat were so dry, and every word was a razor blade. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay?”

Mary furrowed her brows. She approached him, touched his cheek. 

“You’re pale,” she told him. “I hope you’re not sick.”

He grunted, backing away from her and going to the stairs.

“Say good night to your boys,” she called. 

He did, but their faces hurt him harder.

Frederick and his family had been, for a long time now, the twinkle in the eye of all of their social circles: the literature club, Mary’s relatives, the church, their colleagues. They were the guiding star, the goal that everyone else was set to reach. It was always, remember Fred and Mary’s wedding? Fred and Mary are so in love. Aren’t their sons so beautiful? Most importantly, Frederick’s family was the light of his own spirit: the gaslight that had kept it alive.

The events of that afternoon had ruined him, now, had overturned all of the heavens in his mind.

In official terms, Frederick had always been an atheist. He’d participated in the church only because it pleased his wife, and pleasing his wife had been his only real religion. Yet things were changing, tonight: the turbulence inside of him was knocking down all of his sturdiest beliefs. He was certain that his amnesia on the cliff, that afternoon, had represented a grand act of God. There was no other real explanation to the fact. There had been the pressure of the moment to speak, yes, but that wouldn’t have been enough to crush his memory completely. What had happened to Frederick had been more than an idiot accident. This truth was as clear to him as the lake water, now: he’d been punished. 

And as he lay in his bed, that night, the guilt was growing in his mind like a sickly itch. He spent the night with his fingers in his hair, pulling at his scalp, trying to distract from his bursting pain.

It wasn’t long before he concluded that he should have gone and killed himself, all of those years ago in Antwerp. He’d been shown, today, what it was like to not know his own family—and for the very simple reason that he never should have come to know them. If he’d rightfully jumped off the Hersenkam, he wouldn’t have lived to later take Ansel’s life.

The boy, after all, had chosen to climb the fence during the day, when the park had been thickly populated. That was the behaviour of someone who needed attention. His acts had been but a cry for help, which Frederick had violently gagged. He’d decided that he needed to be the one, out of the crowd, to take control, to help the boy off of the edge. In consequence, he’d coaxed him off of the wrong end.

The rash sizzled in Frederick’s mind when the sun reached his eyes. His hands hadn’t left his scalp; clumps of brown hair had gathered by his head. There was no worse agony, he’d come to find, than an itch underneath the skin, one that couldn’t ever be scratched. It felt like a taunt, a Godly mockery. He wanted to dig his way into his brain, to pull it apart. 

The static pain also reminded him, strangely, of what it felt like to have a limb burst from its sleep. It could only signify that his brain, for the first time in two decades, was awake.

“Fred? Are you alright?” Mary gasped, in response to the groaning that he could no longer cage. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re in pain?”

Frederick clamped his eyelids shut. Mary’s voice was stomping on his brain, as would definitely her face.

“I’m fine,” he croaked. 

Still, he felt her approach. The bones on the back of her hand were knives to his forehead. 

“You’re sweating,” she tried. “I need—”

“No,” Frederick growled. He grabbed at her wrist, threw it to the pillow.

There was a pause. A cold silence came over Mary as she backed away off of the bed, then toward the door. 

“I’ll call your work, and mine,” she said, in a single breath. 

As she stepped out to the hallway, Frederick vomited.

Mary left him alone, after that, save but to clean up after him and to bring him food. He didn’t need to leave the bed to plan his death, after all—and he’d decided that he’d jump off of the same cliff as Ansel had. It’d be only right. And while he’d never before tasted this flavour of pain, Frederick and his previous self still agreed on one thing. Jumping to one’s death—jumping, hence, literally into death—was the most dutiful way to go. 

He decided that he’d drive to the cliff when it was dark, when there was no more audience. The cliff would be an open crime scene for another day, or maybe two. He couldn’t take the public’s attention away from Ansel; he’d already stolen too much from the young man. 

Frederick stayed in place for his two waiting days, but he also still didn’t sleep. Even once he had decided his fate, the shame in his mind kept growing like prickly bark on a tree. As much as he begged for sleep, the pain was much too grating. Now that his mind was truly awake, it wouldn’t let Frederick forget again—not even for a moment—that he was meant to die.

He never hungered, either. He didn’t thirst. Sustenance was for survival, and survival was no longer Frederick’s purpose. And so he hid all of Mary’s cooking under their shared bed. She’d be alerted to it when it began to rot, of course—but the smells were masked, for now, by his lingering vomit.

There was nothing left that Frederick wanted to taste except sleep. He thought of nothing but sleep. He lusted for it: for its curves, the ups and downs, the vivid feeling of it, of being inside of it. On his final morning, as he watched Mary change out of her nightgown, he felt even more sickness cooking in his throat. He didn’t know how he’d ever been attracted to that custard-like flesh; nothing at all was erotic to him, now, but the perfect softness of slumber. This was true, of course, because he was meant to have the best kind, the ultimate coma: the kind in which he’d soon plunge the deepest and never have to leave. 

Frederick woke the next morning in a bed that was not his own. Even his body didn’t feel like his own. He was swollen and smothered with pain; he moaned as he opened his eyelids.

He hadn’t thought that Hell would have tile ceilings.

“Sir?” a woman’s voice scraped at his mental wall. Frederick turned his head, with some expanding pain. Yet he noticed that the pain on the inside had cleared, and that the world was no longer turning. As he looked to the young lady, he saw her hair was in a tight bun that pulled at her skin, making white lines. She was wearing all white, too. Yet there was no way that Frederick had been sent to heaven. He looked down, next, to himself: above the blue cover, his arms were draped in yet even more white. His legs felt fatter. 

This is a hospital, he thought. Alright, alright, that makes some more sense.

“Do you remember what happened to you?” the nurse asked while Frederick squinted. With some distant nausea, he passed his eyes over her nametag: DANICA. 

“You were in an accident,” she informed him. “You fell asleep at the wheel.” 

Frederick looked back to the ceiling. 

“You’re lucky to have survived,” she told him, and she dampened her voice. “Can you remember your name, sir?”

“Was anyone else hurt?” he asked. Reality draped over him, a coarse blanket.

“No,” she told him. “Your name, please.”

 “Frederick Ivey,” he spoke. It was difficult. He felt as if he were breathing in smoke, again.

“Your wife?”

“Mary Ivey.” Ignoring the clawed rip of pain, he sat up as much as he could. “Where is she? My—”

“Your family’s waiting. They’ll be very relieved,” Danica smiled down at him. “Just a few more questions, first. Do you remember where you were going?”

“The park.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know the name. It was by the lake, after highway E12.”

Danica’s face looked, in the next moment, to have jumped and drowned for him. “Oh,” she said.

Frederick felt a pull in his stomach. “What?” he said.

“You haven’t heard about…”

“I have, I have. Someone died there just the other day.”

“Many people have.” 

“What?” His patience was trickling.

She went to a large grey bin near the door, leaning down and fiddling through. 

“There.” She returned to him, presenting him with a page in a newspaper. The headline was, Hetistil District Shaken by a Self-Killing—Again. She pointed to the third paragraph. “Now. Your family,” she said, and she went to the door. 

Frederick took the news between his rough hands.

“My brother had precious things in his life. He had so many people and things that he loved. He was going to teach primary. We were meeting for lunch to discuss it,” Remi told us. “Above all things, he was terrified of heights. So, I simply can’t believe he would ever do this…  thing willingly.” When we asked him if he believed in the cliff’s supposed curse, however, he presented no pointed answer. “I’ve heard so much in this past day,” he admitted. “People insist Ansel touched the fence for too long and that it convinced him, somehow, in some way, to climb over. They say my brother probably didn’t know that he shouldn’t ever touch it. But I still have trouble believing that whole myth.”

“It’s no myth,” one superstitious local had insisted, earlier in the day. “Many of us call that fence Hell’s Gate, and it’s not just a funny nickname.”

Frederick’s confusion was a whirlpool in his chest.

“I am a bit offended by the speculation,” Remi had added. “But I’m glad that that man came to the fence when no one else would dare go near. I would have thanked him, too, if he hadn’t run.”

When asked what exactly this curse could be doing to convince healthy minds to jump—and to convince them so quickly—the local became flustered. 

“Well, I can’t know that,” he claimed. “That, you might want to ask the runaway man, if you can find him. He’s the only one, after all, who has ever climbed over that fence and then climbed back. Maybe he was too focused on the other fellow.”

Frederick’s confusion turned to realization, then, and then repugnance, and finally a widening relief.

It flooded his throat.

an earlier version of this story was previously published in New Reader Magazine, Issue 5 (March 2019)

[miamaimania]

Journey into the Surreal: Virgil Finlay's Illustration for 'Famous Fantastic Mysteries', 1943

[sagehills]

The masculine urge to become a mountain man. Only come off the mountain twice a year to get supplies. Farm and harvest and hunt and build everything else. Talk to myself constantly. Stop coming into town for a few years after the age of 76. The sheriff finally comes up to check on me and finds the door to my shack wide open and my skeletonized body lying in bed, tucked up under the covers. They all forgot my name so they just put ‘Mountain Man’ on my tombstone. Shack left to decay but I’m not quite done having fun. My ghost lures lost hikers in and makes them keep me company. They come off the mountain rambling about the crazy old man in the hand hewn log cabin with fire in his eyes and leaves on the floor. I was alone in life but I don’t want to be lonely in death.

[coffinwoodx]

couple of screenshots of kim’s wikipedia page that i felt so deeply in my soul

[jakegyllenbaalz]

random film title cards

[sagehills]

EoE! Finneas confronting Withered!Finn in a Spiderverse supercollider apparition.

< Context: Yurinika’s story that EoE!Finneas created a fragment of reality where Finn and Sunflower could be safe together, https://www.tumblr.com/yurinika/754655656537112576/just-sunflower-dreaming-of-a-place-where-magic

Withered!Finn as Kingpin, with the massive body as instead overly expressive bouquets. They become the first item that completely fills Orchid’s vision when they turn to greet Finn. Over time in flashbacks, the bouquets analogize Orchid’s growing realization of Finn’s overbearing control.

Imagine what colors of bouquets to convey the increasing feeling of oppression. Maybe over time, the arrangements become a single color? Such as white on white flowers that remind Orchid of a hospital room.

Prompt (238)

“Wayward travellers don’t often find themselves here,” the wizard said, hitting their stick against the boulder upon which they stood.

The villain gripped their map of the land tighter.

“I know,” the villain said. “But there’s someone I need to find.”

[oakendesk]

Fantastic Universe Science Fiction Oct 1958

Virgil Finlay

[darkstoryspinner]

Mr. Tumnus

Public domain photo by Ola Safarova, flickr The day they took you away, Mr. Tumnus stood under the lamppost by the fragrant magnolia tree. (You loved playing the part of Edmund.) When will he be back, I asked the cop. I don’t know, he replied. I prayed to the Lion of Narnia wondering if he would listen.

[thebramblewood]

The Full Moon Revelry wasn't as rowdy as promised, but it was still illuminating.

Beginning / Previous / Next

You can read more about Naomi and Micah's grandmother's sacrifice (and their mother's quest to revive her) here!

Naomi: It's not too late to turn around. I can already tell this thing will be full of freaks and weirdos.

Micah: No one forced you to join me, you know.

Olive: Spellcaster! Welcome!

Micah: Magic may run in the family, but I've never really called myself a-

Olive: Let us bask in each other's presence.

Micah: Oof. Um. Okay.

Naomi: Awfully touchy-feely for a stranger.

Olive: Your grandmother always spoke so highly of you both.

Naomi: [snorts] Yeah, right.

Micah: Wait, you know Grandma?

Olive: The dead and the living of Ravenwood owe her a great deal. If the Magic Realm had fallen all those years ago, the Netherworld would have shortly followed.

Naomi: Right. She sacrificed herself for the good of all Simkind, blah, blah, blah. You know what else runs in our family? Tall tales. Now, who the fuck is this ugly hunk of granite?

Olive: Why, naturally, that’s the Ancestor!

-

Ekade: Oh, yeah, I’ve got one of those cards. It’s yours for a small favor. Attend Afterlife Anonymous and report back to me. I’m doing a PhD on what makes ghosts choose to stay or leave. My working hypothesis: love.

-

Naomi: Can we go yet? This crowd is fucking lame.

Micah: We have to stay for the swim, at least.

Naomi: Oh, right, the exhibitionist parade. Yippee.

-

Naomi: Hellooooo! I thought we were all getting naked.

God, it’s freezing in there. Someone could have died!

Olive: Indeed. It’s rather a shame no one did.

Naomi: Lady, what’s wrong with you?

-

Micah: [softly] Another one of Alice's.

-

Micah: Naomi, wait! There's something buried here!

[libraryledge]

Reflecting on the Crushes I've Had on Fictional Characters Over the Years, Apparently I Have a Type...

Goofy dorks. XD

Anyway, I'm open to writing about these fandoms (and many others). Let me know in the comments or anonymously in the "Questions/Story Requests" feature of my page if you have ideas for future pieces or stories. I'd love to hear them. :)

[lepetitdragonvert]

Unicorns ! Unicorns ! by Geraldine McCaughrean

1997

Artist : Sophie Windham

[pascalepalaces]

"Brainworm" in Eclectica Magazine 24.4:

Oct/Nov 2020  •   Fiction

by Pascale Potvin

I didn't understand why she'd had to kill him. I'd heard her wails from across the house like an anti-birth. I found her red when only two weeks prior she'd been all blue confetti.

"She doesn't remember any of it," the doctor had explained, once the cries had stopped reverberating in me. "It may have been some sort of trauma response."

I spent the first minutes next to her wondering how I'd explain this to our families. Andrea had been the sole survivor of a knife attack? She'd only been trying to trim his hair?

I had my own trauma response when I heard her again, just weeks later.

"Liam, I'm so sorry," she sobbed, hard into me. "I think I was too scared of hurting him."

"What do you mean?" I told her. "You did. You did hurt him."

"Yeah, but..." And she hugged me tighter—to avoid my eyes, I sensed. "I think I was trying to save him. From me. Later on."

She told me about the fears, the thoughts she'd had ever since the gender reveal. I drank myself to sleep nearly every night after that, and I slept more during the day. I only ate take-out, not able or willing to stomach what I myself had brought into being.

I would sometimes hear Andrea throwing up, upstairs, too—but the whole sound of it was different. I was by that point convinced she was going all the way back through the pregnancy. Somehow rewinding.

Yet when I next followed the noises to our bedroom—my clumsiest climb—I saw a new, brighter shine of remorse in the woman's eyes. In her hand.

"I'm a monster," she said to me. "I deserve this."

"No," I mustered, my brain going heavy. "We'll get you into therapy."

Still, she raised her fist and crossed herself out in one swipe—right then and there, like she'd used red pen.

"We got concerned because she was so precise with the cut, with hitting her carotid artery," I was informed that night by a Doctor Number Two. "Yet she was also just shy of a fatal depth."

There was a ringing in my ears like screaming, again. This time, I felt I was hearing every cry beyond her office walls.

"I don't know what you're saying," I groused.

"We found what is called P. Caedis," the doctor explained, her face furrowing. "In Andrea's brain. It's usually found in rodents. Do you know if you have a rat problem?"

"No," I said, my mind still all bent. "I don't understand."

"Essentially, it's a really nasty parasite," she told me. "And she'll be okay, but I'm very glad we found it when we did. It'll take hard control of its host and is essentially lethal."

The air around me stiffened.

"It's all gradual, but often it gets the host to hurt themselves, to drain blood from their brain and take over further," she explained. "It's hard to know for sure, but we think it may have sensed your late son's brain, before hers, and treated it as the threat."

I was overturned.

"So that thing is why she hasn't been herself, lately?" I asked.

"Absolutely," she said. "But I want you to know, the surgery has a high success rate."

As expected, my wife could only remember shy and dizzy parts of the prior weeks. We celebrated her recovery in the spring, with a boozy lunch by the river and a walk where the plum trees were budding again.

Her eyes were shimmering just like the water, her voice like the birds.

"We'll try again," I finally spoke, finally said it out loud. At that, Andrea smiled faintly at me, and she raised her chest to take in the warm air. She looked over to the kids playing frisbee, in the field, like she had so many times before.