Now that The Kinter House is done, I feel the urge to write something a little more lighthearted. Dark still, but not quite so twisted.
The piece below was a fun romp. It was written with admitted haste, as I’m also tackling NaNoWriMo this month and I have words (quite a lot of them) to churn out today. This is just a brief reprieve from the book-in-progress. Like so much of my flash fiction, there’s more to this story than the 500 words below. I’d like to come back to this one and explore what happens next, but I had a 500 word limit this week, so all you get is a teaser.
The prompt, from the 500 Club, was this:
Write a character in the wrong place at the wrong time. What makes your character vulnerable in this situation? Will he or she use that vulnerability to help in the situation?
Okay, so I could have adhered to the prompt more strictly than I did. Eh, it’s NaNoWriMo. I’m not going to sweat it.
I hope you enjoy this little bit of madness.
the truth about fairies
(or at least one of them)
Fairies are unpredictable at best. That’s the first thing people don’t understand about them. Here’s the second: they are nothing like Tinker Bell. They don’t glitter or shimmer. There’s no such thing as magic fairy dust that will make you fly. You can say you don’t believe in them all day long and not one of them is going to keel over.
Don’t believe the hype.
Take Azulæiø, for example. (Yeah, that’s a bitch of a name to pronounce. I just call her Az, for short.) She’s about a foot tall and has wings. Gossamer wings, even. But that’s where the typical fairy stops and the atypical starts. First off, she smokes. Like a chimney. She rolls her own because, (a) ‘big-person-sized’ cigarettes are unwieldy, and (b) she’s a bit of a tobacco snob. Only Drum Dark Kentucky will do.
She also likes explosives of all shapes and sizes, chaos magic, cheap Chinese take-out and, of course, moonlit walks on the beach. Her favorite band is Nine Inch Nails. Her favorite movie, Shaun of the Dead. And lately she’s been trying to get me into bed with her.
Yeah. I don’t get it either. I would hope to God ‘tab A’ is entirely too big for ‘slot B’, but she just grins and says, “The fay have a way.”
I try to avoid her when she’s on her period, but last month I was working a complex spell with a hint of dark magic to it–raven’s blood, nothing too grim–and I needed her help. I scried her and was met with, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Hey Az. Um, I need some help with a spell.”
“Too good to sleep with a fairy, but ooh, you’ll come begging for help when it suits you, eh? Long shanks, you got balls even if you won’t use them!”
I narrowed my eyes. “Az–are you drunk?”
“I had one shot!”
“That’s like me drinking a full liter.”
“Agh,” she said slurring. “I can hold my…”
Here she seemed to nod off for a moment and then her head snapped up. “Be right there!”
One moment she was an image in my scrying bowl and the next she was beside me. She was wearing leather jeans and a halter top, presumably from the Red Light Barbie collection. And she was holding a small ball of C-4.
I eyed the explosive. “What’s with the boom-boom?” I asked.
“You won’t have me…” she said stumbling to the left “…no one else can, either. Or you. No one can have you. Or me. Both of us!”
“You’re going to blow us up?” I said, mildly amused.
She looked up into my face, her inebriation melting away under a wave of anger that I can only describe as ‘threat level: woman-scorned’. She held a tiny lighter in one hand and the C-4 in the other.
“You think I’m bluffing.” She didn’t slur a single word.
“Clearly, I misjudged.”
She nodded once. “Damn straight.”
Then she flicked the lighter.