#flashback to this summer in the grocery store when all of a sudden I was like

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

While your prompts are invaluable as prompts for keeping my brain occupied (like an endless stream of new toys to play with) you're also an incredibly talented microfiction writer.

Thank you 🥺🥺🥺

[thesilkentheater]

cosmic gender envy, and trauma

It's been a long time since that summer, but every time the season brings with it bad memories and unwilling flashbacks in the corner of their eye. The festive banners and popsicles in big grocery store boxes make them think there's an eye watching them from beyond the veil, ready to pluck them up and take them on an unforgettable journey.

Though it wasn't all bad. There are good parts that they remember- looking out into a galaxy all around them, no pressure in the slightest, allowed to ramble and talk to this cosmic entity who was very confused by the gender problem they were having, never needing the concept. And, eventually, they came to the conclusion that they didn't really need the concept, either.

But that was the minority.

Three people died that summer. The first was in their third encounter with the strange demi-gods that roam the forest there, long after the group had figured out they were lost and found the route to civilization was becoming stranger and stranger. It would loop in on itself without doing so at all, fireflies painted red leading the way to their demise and safety all at once.

They remember it clear as day. It had been a hungry wolf sort of thing- they all looked sort of like things, or amalgamations of things, but none quite right- the size of a sixteen wheeler, and saliva dripped from its maw as it asked them for an offering to pass. But they had no animals to offer it, and so had resorted to blaming one another.

Someone pushed someone else, who shoved the person to their right, who was promptly gobbled up into the gaping maw as the wolf let them pass.

Maybe it would've been worse, if it was bloody or gruesome. But they think it might have been better, because it wouldn't have seemed so sudden. There would've been a process, a point where you could say he was alive and then he was dead, the time pinpointed on a clock and obvious enough that when it slid down the creature's throat you knew it was just meat. It was an, for all intents and purposed, perfectly intact person that was there one moment and gone the next.

And that alone made it feel so much worse. Like they weren't an indelible mark on this earth, that any one of them could be erased in an instant, forgotten and uncared for and simply no longer existing. Perhaps if they'd thought a little harder about it they'd realize that he had family and friends waiting for him outside this forest, but in the moment, everyone was so stunned and silently passed in such a way that it seemed they were all willing to forget he ever existed.

Of course, that could never be the end, because of course it couldn't. Because the the path had started to dwindle, and eventually the fireflies were the only thing guiding them. And then, it turned out, they were on a beach.

A great mermaid-thing greeted them, taller than a two-story house, and with a gentle smile said, "If you'd like, I will bring you all back now, but there is more to be found here for you. To continue, I will take one of you; but if you'd like to leave, I will assist you."

"Will we be able to leave if we say no?" Asked someone, before anyone could speak.

"Likely not until the end. For few creatures in these woods remember kindness; but I, of the sea, know it well."

"Of course we're going to leave," said someone at the same time one of the girls argued, "We should keep going."

And so the argument began. Shouting and terrible faces and petty drama and everything was all dredged up, and everyone was involved except for them; they sat on the side of a tree, yawning and hugging their knees, and hoped a decision would be reached eventually. Perhaps there was intricacies to the argument, perhaps nonsense and lines of logic that never went anywhere and gratuitous appeals to the natural human desire to live, but at the end of the day they weren't really listening.

Instead, they had been listening to a strange cosmic voice that had entered their ears. "Hello, dear."

And that had been the start of it all, really, hadn't it? Because the star seeing old deity had, eventually, convinced the selkie- and he said it was a selkie, not a mermaid-thing, because of some reason or another- to take a life and have them continue on the path, because if they left right now they would all go mad.

So the second death had to be voluntary, because the selkie was far too kind to take one by force. Everyone looked at each other, except for a girl they think was named Daisy, who walked forward one step and said, "I'll do it."

And the selkie, again unwilling to rip and tear flesh, simply dragged her under the water with tangled piece of kelp and bid them on their way with a fresh set of fireflies and a purpose- that there were only three left to meet on this trail.

The rest of the night is a blur, thankfully. They remember the beings- the owl with one eye slashed, a spider whose massive web had gone stale, and the deer with seven eyes. Sort of, in approximations and vague gestures, anyway, because those things were all red and black and non-euclidean in the same way that the being they worship now is incorporeal.

"Worship" is a strong word. They chat, sometimes, and there's no particular power dynamic because there's no reason for there to be one. If that being had not wanted their company and unfiltered words, he could have killed them on the spot. Easy as that.

It ended up well, they suppose, putting a box away on the shelf. But the eyes they see peering at them from shadows, and the drool they feel drop to the floor despite there being nothing, and the webbing they get caught in without ever being stuck to anything real; that will never leave them.