This is a story I wrote a few years ago while not entirely “with it”. It’s not my usual style or content, but I don’t want it to just sit in my Google Drive forever.

I haven’t edited it much because I feel like that would be betraying my past self.

Content warning for obsessive sexual thoughts.

His weed dealer hadn’t been in, which was weird because his dealer was always in - either him or his brother were always in, and even though he hadn’t texted ahead like usual it shouldn’t matter because one or the other should be in. When he had walked up and rung the doorbell he saw a curtain rustle in a nearby house. Someone had seen him ring the doorbell, but he had been there a few days ago and no one had been curious enough to peek through the curtain and watch him ring the doorbell - surely they didn’t watch everyone ring the doorbell all the time, and it wasn’t an unusual time of day to ring the doorbell, it wasn’t like it was 4am or anything, it was a normal time to ring the doorbell and there was no reason for anyone to watch him ring the doorbell, unless -

Unless his dealer Jack (was that his real name? It seemed funny to be a roguish type and actually be called Jack) had been arrested. That would be a good reason to get twitchy and watch all the loser druggies lining up and maybe she (it was probably a she) had taken a photo of everyone so she could report them to the police, although the police wouldn’t care about people buying weed but she (whoever she was) might do it anyway and then there would be a photo of him somewhere on the police system and he had already gotten into trouble with the police in the past for theft and he had put all of that behind him and had a proper job now but maybe they’d just look at his name and think he was a wrong ‘un and go through everything about him.

His dumb fuck parents had named him Nicholas; his mother had married his father and taken the name Kidd and then named him Nicholas and when he was little it didn’t matter that people called him Nick and he was just Nick but then he grew taller and his voice grew deeper and he became Nick Kidd - Nick Kidd, like Kiddy Nicker, like he kidnapped children, like he was a paedophile. People didn’t even say “someone has nicked a kid”, that wasn’t a thing people said, but when it was his name it suddenly was. He knew no one really thought he was a paedo and he definitely wasn’t a paedo, but all the guys would call him a paedo - a gay paedo even - and even when he spoke to his little brother they’d see that and make jokes and he definitely wasn’t a paedo and he tried to get people to call him Nicholas but then that was too snooty so he told people to call him by his middle name Eddie. His school friends did call him Eddie but no one else called him Eddie; he was still Nick Kidd, and on official documents he was still Nicholas Kidd, Nick Kidd, but now he was older everyone did call him Eddie. Most people thought Eddie was his real first name and that was good but there was still a Nick-Kidd-ness about him and as he walked home weedless he could hear the name as his feet struck the pavement - Nick-Kidd-Nick-Kidd. And that’s what the police saw him as, his birth name on official documents, Nicholas Kidd, Nick Kidd, so if some old curtain-twitcher saw him then the police would read his name and they wouldn’t trust him - a friend of a friend of his was a police officer so he probably knew his name and probably knew all the Kiddy Nicker jokes and the whole force would know his name and they’d think “no smoke without fire”.

What if it wasn’t because of the weed that his dealer had been arrested - almost certainly arrested? He stopped in the street to Google Jack’s name. There were no articles about him, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been arrested. He realised he shouldn’t stop in the street because people might look at him. The police didn’t really arrest people for selling a bit of weed, not small-scale, they might arrest Jack on that pretence so they could investigate everything else about him. One time when Nick had been round his house there was a girl there who was probably Jack’s girlfriend, or Jack’s brother’s girlfriend, and she seemed about twenty, but he wasn’t good with ages so she could have been younger and Jack was in his forties anyway so he shouldn’t have been going out with a twenty-year-old. If she was even twenty years old. She could have been fifteen - it was entirely possible Jack had been going out with a fifteen-year-old and had only ever dated fifteen-year-olds and it had been Nick’s responsibility to help her or tell someone but he had been silent.

So the curtain twitcher could have been reporting to the police all the potential paedophiles that had gone round Jack’s house and everyone would have already heard all the jokes about Nick and they’d think “no smoke without fire” and get all up in his business and search his house and it would mess with his work and he’d lose his job, or else everyone there would shun him and he’d feel he’d have to lose his job. It wasn’t like he had ever had sex with a child or watched child porn or even really thought about children. Had he thought about children? He was pretty sure he hadn’t, but he had thought about a lot of things so it was possible he had thought about children at some point, and when it came to porn he had to just trust that everyone involved was eighteen or older - he couldn’t really be sure, they didn’t present their passport during the video or before or after the video and actually that would have made him feel a lot better even if it might disrupt the flow, if the women (and the men? But the men always seemed older) all presented their passports so he could be sure he wasn’t a paedophile.

It was all unlikely, it was unlikely Jack had been arrested for being a paedophile and that the nosy cunt next door was taking note of all the other potential paedophiles, and even if it turned out he had watched some video with someone who was under eighteen (and some of them really did look quite young, so that even if they weren’t eighteen they were probably made for paedophiles so they could pretend the girl/woman was under eighteen while they were jerking off, and although he avoided anything with schoolgirl vibes sometimes he’d start a video and it would have schoolgirl vibes or creepy vibes, and with all the homemade videos with useless titles he couldn’t really be sure of the vibes until he started watching it and by then it was too late) then it was more likely that the police would be able to see he hadn’t been searching for children, he at most came across one or two which accidentally featured someone who could actually pass for eighteen and was advertised as of age, and if it was an accident then he wouldn’t be put on the sex offender’s register, and it wasn’t a case of “no smoke without fire”. 

There was no reason to worry about any of this, even if it was possible, entirely possible, that his dealer was a paedophile and he was an accidental paedophile  - and in fact he did once have a dream that he was wanking in school toilets, it was the toilets of an all girl’s school, a primary school, but he hadn’t actually dreamt of a child, unless there was a part of the dream he had forgotten, which was also possible, entirely possible, and that would make him a paedophile if he had sexual dreams about children, and then he really ought to be on the register, but what he really needed now was some weed. Then he could sleep and dream about something besides children but the only other dealer he knew could also be a paedophile and he didn’t really like him and he could call a friend but he wasn’t sure it was safe now, it didn’t feel safe now to call anyone. He needed to go home and he needed to lie down and he needed to think clearly about all this because he wasn’t thinking clearly and he just needed some clarity and if his mind was clear then he could work out what to do now.

Reading this back, it’s really hard to resist sorting out the grammar, though I suppose that defeats the point. The idea at the time was to write something as unpleasant to read as The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace. Thoughts?

This is for Fictionistas October prompt! I’ll share the prompt at the end of the story.

On a narrow outcrop overlooking the vale perched a small kiosk. It had stood there for as long as anyone could remember, despite being almost always closed and only accessible via a small woodland trail. Sometimes, when the full moon shone and the sky was blanketed with stars, one could spot light from within, but it was rumoured no one had reached it before the shutters came down once more.

Most of the townsfolk considered it an eyesore that disrupted the stunning view of the forest. Others, mostly older women, argued it was iconic, a charming quirk of the area. Either way, the paperwork regarding the land's ownership had long been lost, so any proposals for demolishing it would open quite the can of worms.

Edith was one of the few people alive who had seen the inside.

In her teens, Edith and her friend Ingrid were inseparable. They had shared baths together when they were little, shared makeup as they grew older, and even joked about sharing partners.

Then Fenton arrived. He was a few years older than the pair, and was staying with a friend in town during his summer break from university. They met him while lurking outside a wine shop, and Edith had squeaked an awkward "Excuse me!" and asked him to buy them alcohol. Unlike their usual straightforward transactions, Fenton wanted to talk to them after he handed over their cheap bottle of wine. 

The man’s cocky attitude was intolerable to Edith, but Ingrid chatted to him with a girlish simper, and agreed to show him around town. Soon it was with Fenton, not Edith, that she shared secret in-jokes, and while at first Edith hoped it would be just a summer fling, it soon became clear she had fallen prey to his charms. She couldn't put her finger on anything bad about him, besides the questionable age difference, but, day by day, her friend's vibrant, playful nature was replaced by a timid, fragile disposition. 

Edith vowed to get him out of the picture.

One night, while the three of them were drinking vodka by the playground swings, Edith spotted the kiosk lit up and couldn't tear her eyes away from it. She had seen its light in the past, had even raced there before, but this time it tugged at her spirit.

"Look!" She pointed it out to her companions. Edith saw the kiosk reflected in Fenton’s eyes, as if they were standing right next to it.

"Oh. It's that funny little building you told me about." He poked Ingrid in the stomach. She flinched, then chuckled. 

"We should go there," Edith insisted, her heart thumping. "It's, it's... Well, it's a town tradition, isn't it? To see if you can reach it before it shuts again." She looked at Ingrid, who nodded meekly. 

"What odd little friends you have," Fenton told his girlfriend. Then, to Edith: "But fine. Lead the way."

The trio were sufficiently inebriated that it took them a while to find the right trail, and once they did, they relied on the pale glow from their flip phones to prevent them from tripping over the roots of overgrown trees.

To everyone's astonishment, the kiosk was still open when they arrived. Behind the counter stood a middle-aged man who resembled an old-fashioned circus performer, with a top hat, a multi-coloured shirt, and a wide, wide grin on his face.

"Hello, my darlings! My, what a winsome fellow you are," the man said to Fenton. 

"Winsome? What you on about? What do you even sell? Looks like the same shit I can get at the newsagents.”

The man's smile didn't fade, but a coldness settled in his eyes.

“Au contraire, my friend. I have a rare little drink here that puts spring in a man’s step, if you know what I mean.” The man gave an exaggerated wink and brought out a glass bottle filled with pink liquid. “I offer a free sample, today only.”

“Sounds quacky to me,” Fenton replied. He turned away and looked back down the path.

“Too chicken to try something new?” Edith asked. She glared at him with a practised sneer. Something had driven her to this spot, and she wasn’t going to turn back now.

Fenton shrugged and approached the counter, but the odd man opened the metal door to the kiosk to let Fenton into the booth. Ingrid moved to follow him, but the man met Edith’s eyes and gave the slightest head shake. Edith flung out an arm to stop her friend.

Fenton sniffed the drink. Then, making sure the others were admiring his bravery, he took a swig.

“Tastes like cranberry,” he said, his face twisting in disgust.

“Why, of course. Cranberry is excellent against unpleasant, tedious infections like yourself.”

For a moment, Fenton froze. Then his limbs jerked like a marionette, his face stretched, and something began protruding out of his head.

“Fenton!” Ingrid shrieked. She stumbled drunkenly towards the kiosk, but Edith held her back, firmly clasping her arm. Ingrid curled into her, trembling, but Edith watched the scene unfold with a savage satisfaction.

Fenton uttered not a word, but anguish was etched into every muscle of his face as his frame widened, his skin roughened, and a top hat burst out of his skull. Meanwhile, the man beside him shrunk, grew jowly, and peered at the pair with terrified beady eyes that were somehow familiar. Then, with an unnatural howl, the man vanished.

“Hello, my darlings!” The changed Fenton traced a finger across his cheek to his wide, wide grin. “My, what a winsome fellow I was.”

Edith grabbed Ingrid’s hand and sprinted back down the trail, never looking back.

Their friendship withered after that night. Months later, Edith came across a familiar face in an old family album. Next to her aunt, arm clenched around her bruised shoulder, stood the same short, beady-eyed man with a weak, weak smile.

I thought I’d kick off my return to Substack with a prompt story, so I wouldn’t get too bogged down with working out what the “perfect” story to come back with was.

The Fictionistas October prompt was: “Do something with these words: vale, simper, fling, cranberry, kiosk, winsome, prey, quacky”. The story had to be under 1000 words.

Considering how varied the words were, this was a difficult prompt! I started off hating the word kiosk because it rooted the story in a modern-day setting, then I ended up having my whole story revolve around it. I think it all comes together fairly well - the “winsome” and “quacky” bits stick out though.

The word limit was the killer here - whenever I try to write flash fiction I always worry the story needs ~200 more words to do it justice. The title was tricky too. Let me know in the comments if you can think of a more engaging title!

I ran away from Substack for a few months. Not just posting here, but reading things here too. I subscribed to lots of brilliant newsletters and now I have gone from the ideal “Inbox Zero” to many, many unread emails that I dare not click on. Exciting emails, intriguing emails, emails containing short stories and think pieces from long time friends whose work I enjoy.

I have been doing some writing, at least. I’ve been channelling some of my feelings into the highly avoidant main character of a potential novel. I’m about a quarter of the way through a first draft and I don’t know how the hell so many people manage to write something so long.

For the past month or so, I kept thinking about how to make my comeback. I figured I should start with a short story, rather than attempt to explain my absence. I even have a title: “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder”, an oh-so-clever reference to both the story and my own disappearance. Unfortunately the story is currently only an idea with no real plot, and the piece that heralds my grand return ought to be perfect. Which obviously no story is going to be, so I really should do away with this grand plan.

I can’t explain my absence. I haven’t been incredibly busy. I haven’t had a breakdown. I haven’t gone to prison or had a baby or travelled around the world. I just didn’t feel like writing for a bit, and then the whole concept of Substack started to feel overwhelming and I wanted to run away and hide. Perhaps its because I tried to put pressure on myself to write daily, and then to write weekly… But if I don’t put any pressure on myself then nothing gets done. Perhaps I got fixated on the idea that if I am charming and funny and authentic then more people will engage with my writing compared to if I push new stories out with no fanfare. But I also know I shouldn’t get so het up about my stupid remodelled concept of truth. Perhaps I was just feeling like a small fish in a vast Substack ocean.

ANYWAY. This post is a message of intent. I will come back with some short stories soon(ish), and with no attempt at a schedule for now. Maybe I’ll also try to be so raw and vulnerable and stunningly authentic that when you look in the mirror all you see is me.

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Snow smothered the landscape as Nessa led five soldiers to her father’s hideout. Despite being spring, a cold snap had gripped the area for the last two days, and the usual deer and rabbit were nowhere to be seen. Even the wind had stilled for their arrival. As she slowed her horse and surveyed the land, she felt stuck in time, her misty exhales disrupting her view.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Cillian asked as he rode up beside her.

Unease trickled through her. Over the past week, she had had to endure constant suspicion from her companions, Cillian being the worst of the lot. The soldiers followed the orders of the Elantraith council, a body set up to investigate the whereabouts of Wanderers, strange beings whose seemingly immortal bodies defied scientific understanding.

The journey was built on a lie. It had been two years since she had last seen her father, two years that she had spent doing odd jobs several counties over and running away from her memories in any way she could. She had never intended to come back, but a chance encounter with a traveller had disrupted her cosy repression. 

The traveller told her that a number of young people had gone missing from Hockmannon and other nearby villages. One man went searching for his son and stumbled across a shallow grave containing a monstrous, misshapen corpse dressed in his son’s clothes. The commonly accepted wisdom was that it had been the work of a Wanderer, the culprit for any strange occurrences these days, but Nessa knew better. She realised that without her to fixate on and ground him, her father’s experiments had become more daring and more deadly.

Nessa knew crimes in the countryside of the poorest county wouldn’t garner much interest, so she told the Elantraith council that her father was in cahoots with a Wanderer, and the pair of them had preyed on the villagers of Hockmannon. Reciting one of her father’s books that she had read in her youth, she gave a convincing description of the Wanderer’s mottled skin and ethereal voice. Her intention had been to tell them roughly where her father’s hideout was and return to drinking herself into oblivion, but Cillian had insisted they had little hope of finding him without her assistance.

So here she was, leading a group of soldiers who hated her through cold, miserable hills, to the only parent she had ever known, the man who had made her life a misery.

Nessa was the only one of the group who was not armed. Each of the soldiers carried a sword and a set of armour, and a gangly magician named Maeve also carried huge bear hides imbued with magic blocking. It felt too late to ask whether they intended to take her father dead or alive. Nessa imagined her father being slaughtered and found herself torn between satisfaction and anguish. When she thought of him being imprisoned, she pictured his accusatory glare, knowing that to his mind, all his “work” was just about bringing forth a new era of enlightenment.

“If we follow this, we’ll be there before nightfall.” Nessa pointed to a river that wound through the valley, her breath forming a faint cloud in the cool air.

“Alright, everyone. Let’s have one stop before our final push,” Cillian called out. As they dismounted, Nessa heard him mutter to Maeve, “Fecking fool’s errand, this. Need to get me back to Daredarra.”

“Gotta keep an eye on the lass when we find her father,” Maeve replied, taking off her gloves and blowing on her fingers to warm them up.

“What do you think I’m gonna do, suddenly switch sides?” Nessa yelled, no longer able to contain herself. “Or you think I’m laying a trap, is that it? You think I went through this and still think like my father?” Nessa opened her coat and pulled up her shirt to reveal the puckered scars and nodules on her abdomen. Goosebumps spread out across her exposed skin. She had never shown them to anyone before, afraid of the questions that would follow. Maeve had the decency to squirm and look away, but Cillian met her gaze.

“You said your father performed these experiments on others. You yourself saw a Wanderer, so you claimed. So why’d you spend two years on your arse doing nothing?”

Nessa straightened her clothes, embarrassed at her outburst. There was no simple answer. 

When she had lived with her father, the only people he had carried out his clumsy surgery on were her and a servant boy, although a seemingly endless number of animals also fell under his knife. He was an animalist, a magician able to see through the eyes of any nearby animal and force it to do his bidding. His power hadn’t come about through study or ancestry, but was merely due to being born when the planets had aligned just right. His life’s ambition was to allow everyone else to have this power, starting with Nessa.

He had often told her how he had tried to ensure she would be born an animalist too, giving her mother fertility concoctions nine months before, and gathering herbs to induce labour on the right day. It was a common enough practice in Tirmorran, although other countries nurtured a hatred of magicians instead, and held abstinence festivals to prevent them from being born. Nessa had dashed his hopes by being born two weeks early. He had been trying to fix the issue ever since.

When she finally fled after the servant died, it didn’t occur to her that anyone might care. It didn’t occur to her that he would seek out new people to further his research. Drowning her sorrows in a different tavern every night felt like the only thing that made sense.

“Did you hear me, woman? I asked why we’re traipsing out to the middle of nowhere two years after you saw a Wanderer.”

“People from Hockmannon and -”

“Yes, we heard what they said. Children of poor families went missing and they think a Wanderer’s responsible. Same shit we hear the whole country over. But you said you actually saw a Wanderer. One lived under your father’s roof. That true? Or did you just want to get attention?”

Now was the moment to tell the truth, Nessa thought. They would still put a stop to him - she knew they wouldn’t want to come back from the trip empty-handed. They might hate her for it, but at least she would no longer have to carry the burden of her lies.

She opened her mouth to speak, then froze. A barn owl had swooped down and perched on a tree branch just over Cillian’s shoulder. Its pitiless black eyes were fixed on Nessa.

An icy terror engulfed her. For a few moments, she felt paralyzed, her mouth hanging open. 

It was her father’s owl.

For years, she had dutifully followed her father’s orders, hunting and cooking and burying the mutilated corpses of rabbits and deer her father had experimented on. There was nowhere she could go to be truly alone, no secret display of defiance she could carry out in the wilderness, because there was always the possibility he was watching. Any time she wandered too far or did something she wasn’t supposed to, she’d see an owl circling above her. Even around the house, there was a mangy cat who followed her around, and she could never be sure it did so of its own accord.

The bird ruffled its feathers, but kept its eyes on Nessa. She felt pinned under that gaze, like the rabbits that would writhe on her father’s surgical table. The last time she had seen the owl was the night she had fled. Under her father’s possession, it had tried to peck and claw at her skin for what felt like hours. When he could no longer possess it at such a distance, it had collapsed to the ground, exhausted.

It could attack at any moment, Nessa thought, yet she couldn’t move a muscle. Her father must have seen the weapons hanging from the horses, and know they were there to put a stop to him. Did he despise her for leaving, she wondered, as she often despised him?

Then the bird screeched, tumbled off the branch, and thumped onto the snowy ground. It screeched again, then spread its huge wings and flew off over the river.

Cillian looked over his shoulder to follow Nessa’s eyeline.

“What is it?”

“He… He knows.” She croaked.

Maeve peered up into the sky and cursed.

“Let’s go, go, go!” Maeve gestured for everyone to get moving. “C’mon Cillian, whether or not there’s a Wanderer, we’ve still got to get the bastard.”

As Nessa got back on the horse, the reins suddenly felt too small, her hands too big. It was a sensation she had been used to when she was younger, and one her father had encouraged, telling her it was a sign that his experiments were working. To feel like she didn’t exist in her own body was the ideal in his mind.

The group broke into a gallop, huge puffs of snow churning up in their wake. Any animal trails that had existed before were hidden from view, so Nessa just led them up the smoothest looking ground, keeping the river on her left to guide her. Even at their fast pace, it was several hours before they crested a ridge and spotted her father’s house.

She hadn’t realised until that moment how hidden it was. It was nestled on the edge of a small wood in a narrow valley, many miles away from the nearest village. Tears stung her eyes. Much as she loathed him, seeing the wooden house flooded her with sorrow at the loneliness he must have felt after she had fled. She abandoned him, she thought. She had been his whole world, and she abandoned him.

The group halted on the ridge, looking down at the quiet valley. A knot formed in Nessa’s stomach as she imagined the upcoming confrontation.

“Do Wanderers have powers?” Maeve asked.

“My father doesn’t know any Wanderers. There, I told you. That doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous enough on his own.”

Cillian snorted.

“You think we haven’t dealt with wayward animalists before? Come on.”

Nessa took the rear as the group rode down to the valley. All were alert for any signs of danger, but nothing stirred. As they approached, they saw the front door hanging open.

“He’s fled?” Meave asked Nessa as they dismounted.

Nessa shrugged, but the knot in her stomach eased. His flight meant she wouldn’t have to face him, not yet at least. Fleeing was the logical choice for him. He had little in the way of fighting skills, last she knew, and whenever he possessed an animal, it left his human body vulnerable. 

Cillian entered first, sword in hand, then the others followed. Nessa lingered outside by the horses at first, half afraid she’d burst into flames if she crossed the threshold, but a cold wind whistled through the valley and soon she relented and stepped in.

The main room was a mess of upturned furniture, smashed crockery, and bloodied clothes. Her father must have been in a hurry to collect everything that was important to him. There was a faint smell of smoke, and Nessa saw the fireplace was clogged with burnt paper, a few embers glowing amongst the ash. She prodded the remains with a poker and spotted a few snatches of her father's spidery handwriting.

“Not long gone, then,” Cillian muttered. He marched outside.

Despite the mess, it was still the same house that had haunted her dreams. The same green woven rug lay on the floor and identical dried herbs hung from the ceiling. The only thing her nightly visions always added was a staircase. In pleasant dreams they were a portal leading far away, in her nightmares she would find herself knee-deep in contorted bloodied corpses.

“There’s someone here!” Maeve yelled from another room. Then: “Oh.”

Nessa looked up from the fireplace and saw flecks of blood on the rug, and a bloodied handprint on the wall. Heart pounding, she followed the sound of Meave’s voice. Her first thought was that her betrayal had been too much for her father. 

Someone lay in her old bed, splattered in blood. Nessa rushed to their side, but soon saw it wasn’t her father. Instead, it was a young, emaciated woman, presumably snatched from one of the villages. Maeve was muttering a prayer over the woman’s body. Congealed blood had formed over several wounds on her torso, and blood caked her hands. There were older scars too, and strange scars and lumps all around her eyes. Her body looked like it had been rearranged after death - her arms were crossed over her chest, her eyelids closed, and pieces of jewellery were laid out beside her on the pillow. Her father had killed her so she wouldn’t spill her secrets, but still thought to show some respect to her corpse. As she realised this, Nessa rushed out of the room and heaved.

Nothing came out of her, but she stayed bent double, feeling like she might throw up at any moment. The hard nodules on her abdomen ached. Why had he killed the woman in her old room? Was it simply where she had been staying since he kidnapped her, or was it a message to Nessa herself, a symbol of his hatred?

“There are tracks, but they’re everywhere. It’ll take a moment to find the true one,” Cillian yelled from outside. With nothing to do, Nessa staggered over to a chair in the corner of the main room and collapsed down onto it.

She had done what Cillian asked her to, no more, no less. The soldiers could go chase after her father, but there was no need for her to venture further, she decided. She didn’t want to stay in the hellish house, but her body felt too sluggish to ride back to Hockmannon.

“Alright you lot, he clearly isn’t here, so let’s get moving. He doesn’t have much of a head start, there’s a chance we’ll catch him by sundown.” Cillian marched over to Nessa. “You coming, or what?”

Nessa slouched back into the chair and gestured for them to leave. She didn’t want to have to face her father, not after seeing the body.

Cillian snorted and left with the others to prepare the horses, but Maeve lingered, a tight smile of pity on her face.

"It's not your fault, you know," she told Nessa.

Nessa stared at her. The thought that she was in some way responsible for the woman's death hadn't entered her head, but now it did. She searched her mind for guilt, but found none. What life did the woman really have? A swift death was better than what the servant boy had suffered.

"Thanks." Nessa replied, just to reassure Maeve that her words had given her comfort.

Nessa listened to the horses whinny as the soldiers rode away. Then there was silence.

It occurred to her to bury the woman's body, but she couldn't bring herself to touch it, not yet. She started a fire to warm herself up and curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace, staring into the flickering flames.

She could have just left her father alone. Or else refused to go with the soldiers. Being back in the house made her feel small again, and the scars on her abdomen throbbed with pain. She hadn’t even entered the surgery room, but she thought she could smell its strange tang from her place on the rug.

Her father used to keep records of his experiments, she remembered, tomes that she was never allowed to gaze on. He had always assumed she didn’t know where he hid them.

Spurred on by this thought, Nessa jumped up and kicked the rug aside, then grabbed a loose floorboard and threw it across the room. At least ten bound books were nestled in the space below, and she grabbed the nearest one, dated a year ago. She wondered if it was only his most recent journal he had burnt in the fireplace. Had he stumbled across some revelation in his work?

She stoked the fire and then settled back down on the rug. With quivering hands, she cracked open the journal at a random page.

It opened to a side portrait drawing of her with her chin up, looking slightly amused. She didn’t even know her father could draw, but he had perfectly cross-hatched the shadows to highlight the contours of her face. Next to it, her father had written:

Always inquisitive, even if she disagrees with everything.

Nessa grimaced. She had expected to find long rants about how she had ruined his experiments, but the affection in his note unnerved her. She flicked through to another page, her eyes caught by another drawing: a rabbit’s head, far more crudely drawn, with Xs marked around its eyes and the base of its whiskers. Below it was a description of how he had pierced a rabbit’s flesh and inserted some of his own dead skin into the wound, theorising that it must be some quality of his body that allowed him to do magic, and it would be more easily transferred to a small creature than a human. 

Nausea returned. She wasn’t surprised by his scribbles - it was the same theory he had been touting for years - but it brought back shadowy memories that she couldn’t be sure were real. Her father returning from a trip to the nearest town, excitedly showing her a series of tiny magic bones, etched with runes. His dejected face as he handed her three dead rabbits to bury. Him closing the door to the surgery room the night the servant boy died.

She felt compelled to read on, to peel back the layers of her enigmatic father and understand how he saw the world. Perhaps even more pressing, she wanted to know how he felt about her. She skimmed through references to his experiments, his dreams, and his childhood, seeking out any mention of herself. For the whole trek here, she had assumed he hated her for leaving, or at least would hate her when he realised what she had done, but when he wrote about her, he wrote with tenderness.

Nessa - quiet as a teenager, did I make her so? When we went to market day in Hockmannon she’d run around with the other children, but when I took her less often, she became near mute.

The village had felt familiar as she passed through it with the soldiers, but she couldn’t remember ever going there regularly.

Stupid of me to attack N. Could have tried to chase her back with a wolf but not actually touch her. Is she well now? Is she alive? Still hope she comes back, realises the work is important. Once I’ve cracked it, I’ll seek her out. Let the Society in Daredarra know she was my inspiration, couldn’t have done it without her.

Nessa let out an empty chuckle at the idea of her father proudly stating he had let several people die under his care. He still thought he would be congratulated and gain the respect of his peers. Then another thought slithered into her mind: he could be right. If he did discover how to transfer magical powers, others might be willing to sweep his criminal behaviour under the rug in the name of progress.

Dreamt of N. We flew through the air, me as a swallow, her as a human spreading her arms. She kept trying to grab me, kill me maybe, but I’d dive to the other side, still wanting to be close. Prophetic? Don’t know what type of person she is now. 

She snapped the book shut. She had had similar dreams, though often she was the prey instead, escaping his clutches. 

A prickly feeling spread through her body, and everything felt small and unreal again. Nothing had changed. She knew he had to be brought to justice, but she realised that until now she had kept him at a pleasant mental distance. He had been the obsessive monster she was drinking to forget. One dimensional. She hadn’t had to think of him as a complex human being with his own thoughts and memories. 

Outside, the sun dropped below the horizon, and a full moon reigned. Nessa pulled herself upright and rummaged through the kitchen, looking for alcohol. Her father used to brew disgusting moonshine that she would swig after his surgical attempts, but now her search came up empty. She shuffled out to the lean-to to gather more firewood, lantern in hand.

There in the moonlight, she saw the outline of an owl, perch utterly still on the nearest tree branch. Once again, Nessa froze. She knew it must be possessed by her father - no normal bird would stare at her so - but if he was going to attack her, he would have done so already. It turned its head from her to a nearby slope, and then back again, as if it wanted her to follow.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”

The owl swooped into the air and landed on another tree, just about visible in the moonlight. Nessa followed.

A cold sweat covered her skin as she followed the owl from tree to tree, barely paying attention to where she was going. She felt like she was in a dream as she tread over the same ground as when she was little, following the same bird her father had possessed on and off for years. 

She often wondered how the owl felt. Her father described possession as two minds conjoining, with him as controller, but he would sense the animal’s desire and allow it a few idiosyncrasies in quiet moments, a brief grooming session, or a sniff of the nearest tree. Whenever she had seen him relinquish his power back to the animal, it always looked dazed or distraught, as if it struggled to cope with its return to freedom. She wondered if they, too, felt unreal.

She wove a path through the snow and followed the bird over the nearest hill and down towards a rocky stream. As she approached it, the owl screeched, then flew off into the night.

On the other bank was a sprawled figure covered in thick furs, their head on a huge knapsack. Nessa lifted her lantern to watch them shakily push themselves up to a seating position and brush the snow off their clothes.

It was her father. His face was more haggard than she remembered. Thick lines creased his forehead, and his cheeks were hollow. He smiled weakly as he peered at her from across the stream.

“Dad.” Nessa wasn’t sure if he could hear her over the babbling stream, so she raised a gloved hand in greeting. He mirrored her.

“It’s good to see you again,” he called out. His tone was uncertain, as if he was trying to convince himself of his words. There was a strange fragility to him. She realised she was the one with power now, backed by soldiers who were somewhere in the hills, even if they weren’t present at the meeting. If they had continued tracking him in the night, it was possible they would follow his trail there soon enough.

“Why did you kill her? The woman. The woman in my bed.” The woman hadn’t even crossed her mind until she found herself mentioning her.

“I’m so close now, Ness.” Despite the water between them, his voice was clear. “So close. I didn’t want someone else to speak to her and get the credit for my discovery. I saw those soldiers with you. Why are you back?”

Nessa set her lantern down to peer at the stream. There were some jagged rocks interrupting the flow, but trying to cross would be reckless. This might be as close to her father as she would ever get.

“I heard there were others. When I left. Other people you… did stuff to. Killed.”

He gazed up at the moon, his face contorted in anguish.

“Nessa. Nessa. Every time you lay on that table, I thought it would be the last. I thought I had cracked it, every time. Then you’d forgive me, and we’d race over the hills as wolves, or soar through the sky together, following each other’s flight. I thought if I got it right with someone else, I could come find you.”

“How many people were there?” Nessa yelled over the water. She wiped her nose and realised her face was wet with tears. He was so earnest she couldn’t bear it. She wanted him to admit he was selfish, cruel, obsessive, but he couldn’t see her point of view any better than she could see his.

He shrugged.

“Nessa, it’s okay. It’s okay,” he said, reaching out a hand as if he could stroke her from metres away. “It wasn’t just to get close to you, it was to connect humanity. Imagine, imagine everyone being able to do what I can do. What would the world look like then? Imagine what we could achieve. This country most of all, if we were the first to discover how to transfer power. Some of them understood what I was doing was necessary, you know. I tended to every one of them. I gave them meaning.”

There was a shout in the distance. Her father turned towards the dark mass of trees on his side of the stream.

“Surrender, dad. Surrender! I don’t care if you tell them about your research or not, just surrender. You’ve hurt enough people. You’ve hurt me. Don’t hurt me more by fighting it.”

Nessa stepped right up to the edge of the bank, the tips of her boots no longer on solid ground.

“That’s what you want? That’s what you really want?” He asked.

They listened to the sound of hurried feet through the snow. Cillian came bursting out of the darkness, unsheathing his sword as he approached Nessa’s father. Meave followed, then the other soldiers, forming a semi-circle around him. Cillian briefly frowned as he glanced in Nessa’s direction, then refocused on her father.

Nessa watched the scene unfold mere metres away from her, unable to act as peacemaker. Cillian stretched out his sword so it touched her father’s exposed throat. 

“We’re to take you back to Daredarra for questioning,” Cillian boomed. 

“Just go with them,” Nessa pleaded. Conflicting emotions tugged at her heart - guilt, eagerness, dread, elation.

The moment stretched out, as if they were frozen in time. Even the wind stilled. Finally her father knelt down in the snow and bowed his head.

Up above, an owl soared, relishing its freedom.

Very loosely inspired by reading some of my dad’s prison journals (with his consent), although he is nothing like the father here.

I ended up taking a lot longer than intended to finish this. I started writing it before Timeball, but really struggled with the plot. It needs more external conflict with the soldiers, and I’m also not sure if the emotional arc makes sense, or feels all over the place. I could edit it more, but I just want to move on to something new. Right now I see this Substack as a playground to push me into writing regularly, not for writing perfect stories.

What are your thoughts on Bird of Prey? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. Also, let me know if you’ve got a better title!

Part of the reason I haven’t posted a “musings” post for a few weeks is because I’m embarrassed that I haven’t written as much as I had hoped I would since I stopped writing daily stories. I feel like if I write a non-fiction post, then I ought to set down official days that I intend to post new stories. I’m quite jealous of my friend Newton Webb who can declare what days he will release new stuff. What foul magic is this?

But here is a declaration anyway: I will post a story to Substack every Tuesday and Friday.

Maybe. Who knows.

A couple of weeks ago Substack introduced its Notes feature, which is rather like Twitter but with an option to only view notes from people you are subscribed to (I think even the larger feed is limited to people a couple of degrees of separation from you). The feature put me on edge because everyone suddenly leapt to promote their Substack, and I felt angst because a) I feel I should be promoting myself on it, because it would be good to have more people see my writing and b) self-promotion makes me feel like I should portray myself in a certain way.

Who would this brand version of me be? Quirky? Cynical and pessimistic? Upbeat and fun? People like to say “be yourself”, except there are many different shades of me (and of everyone else), and to only show one side - and to do so in a short-form “content” way - doesn’t feel authentic.

I often get tangled up in the concept of authenticity. The word gets used over and over in comments on personal essays. It becomes part of a person’s brand, along with words like “honesty” and “vulnerability”. They are important concepts in personal relationships, but I’m not sure how important they are in mass communications. How can anyone publicly post anything truly authentic when they are inevitably choosing what to add and what to remove from their topic of choice? When people turn personal essays into an income stream, how can it be authentic when they have a target audience in mind?

Then I can go too far down that thinking and end up thinking saying “hello” is inauthentic and manipulative - how dare anyone make people aware of their existence! In those moods I feel the only authentic person is the hermit Christopher Knight, who spent 27 years living in the wilderness by himself. #lifegoals.

I’ve thought about writing personal essays, but then I instantly question my motivations. Would it benefit me or my readers to write about being a bald woman, or about my dad going to prison, or about other life anomalies? Or would I just be mining my personal life for clicks? I’ve spoken to friends about complex life topics, so I’m not sure how putting it on paper helps me. Readers might be briefly engaged, but it’s unlikely to make any lasting impression on them, and those who have experienced similar things may end up feeling alienated rather than “not alone”.

Then there’s the whole framework of the personal essay. Such things are supposed to be full of strong emotion, moving from talking about The Challenging Thing, the subsequent problems, and then about how, with the right support, or mindset, or drugs, things became better. There’s room for some nuance, but because it’s aiming for a familiar arc, there’s a level of blandification.

You’re not supposed to talk about things with a crippling amount of uncertainty. You’re definitely not supposed to point out that memories aren’t reliable and that what you remember of the past likely bears little relation to the truth, and reflects more about your current self than your past self. Or about how most things in life are loosely connected events that we as humans spin into a coherent narrative to stave off the nihilism.

The only writing I do that actually feels authentic is fiction. All stories I write inevitably have some part of me in them - they reflect my interests or experiences, no matter how fantastical the settings are.

Future Stories

If I try to share details of my future stories, will that help motivate me? Let’s see.

• Bird of Prey - Nessa faces suspicion and complicated questions as she guides soldiers to her murderous father’s hideout.

  • The story takes place in the Esteredge universe, along with some previous short stories like The Freedom to Soar and Hunting Down Memories, although as it takes places in a different country it doesn’t have the usual Roman vibe.

  • I haven’t decided on a proper title yet, so it is liable to change.

  • I will certainly publish it this week, hopefully tomorrow if Tuesdays are going to be a Post A Thing on Substack Day.

• Vessel - After being possessed by an otherworldly entity for a year, a woman tries to piece together the murky memories of her puppeted life.

  • I haven’t decided if this relates to other modern occult-y stories…

  • If I don’t publish it on Friday then it will be left until next week.

Interesting Reads

I’ll tell you what isn’t an interesting read: Crash, by J. G. Ballard. An interesting concept made incredibly dull and repetitive. The repetition is presumably meant to reflect the narrator’s obsession, but you can still have repetition while being engaging.

Interesting Fiction

• Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills - One of the Nebula short story finalists. I loved it but it was heavy, so you’ve got to read it in the right mood. I think it’s an interesting example of an emotional build-up based around a concept rather than any individual character.

Interesting Non-Fiction Articles

• What Do People Really Mean by "Invisible Prose"? by Lincoln Michel (Countercraft)

• Why was my neighbour's body not found for two years? - A BBC article about the failings of a housing association, and what the neighbours went through in that time. Also a depressing reminder that some people are very alone. See also: Vulnerable woman lay dead in Surrey flat for more than three years.

• Inside the life coaching cult that takes over lives - Also a TV documentary (available on iPlayer under the strange title “A Very British Cult”) and a podcast. The Lighthouse cult is interesting due to a) it’s insistence it isn’t a cult because there is no secrecy (true - all the calls are recorded and their websites are are drowning in information and words words words), b) its use of Reddit to target naysayers and c) its manipulation of modern dialogue around trauma to insist that all the cult members families are abusive narcissists.

• Strange News from Another Star, No. 1: Reality by Sam Kriss - I haven’t read the other related posts, but it talks about how dreams reflect the feel of a society and includes some fascinating dreams people had during the Third Reich.

My Recent Stories

Since my last musings post, I’ve put three stories up on Substack:

• How to Win Over the Chittering Queen - An eldritch horror/fantasy story. I was pleased with the end result, though I think it lacks emotional depth, opting for strangeness instead.

Excess Reality

How to Win Over the Chittering Queen

After a decade slaving away on the factory floor, I have only just enough savings to travel to the Capital and rent a room for a month. A month is all I need. The king has been put to the fire and the dukes and duchesses of old have been brought low, cast out onto the streets to shiver and beg like the rest of us. The Chittering Queen has changed things…

Read more

3 years ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · ML Augustin

• The Lake’s Lover - A hundred word story. I’ve been enjoying doing the odd one of these. It can feel a little like a puzzle, trying to fit everything I want/need into so few words.

Excess Reality

The Lake's Lover

Shannon was in love with the lake, and the lake loved her. When she slipped into its cool embrace, she could hear it murmur: “The toxic behaviour of past lovers forced me to harden my heart, but with your help, I can open up again.” Shannon dove to the lake’s bed and pushed aside slimy slabs to reveal her lover’s quiverin…

Read more

3 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · ML Augustin

• Timeball - A flash fiction for the Fictionista's April prompt. A bit out of my comfort zone. While it’s satisfying enough for the prompt, I don’t like it much. Honestly, I find it a bit of a shame I end up getting more views/likes on prompt stories when I think they are weaker than most of my other stories!

Excess Reality

Timeball

This story was written for the the Fictionistas April prompt: “In the United States from 1942-1976 pinball was outlawed in most major cities. Write about an illegal underground pinball club.” My story isn’t set in that era as I wanted to put a speculative spin on it, but its still about an illegal underground pinball c…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · ML Augustin

This story was written for the the Fictionistas April prompt: “In the United States from 1942-1976 pinball was outlawed in most major cities. Write about an illegal underground pinball club.” My story isn’t set in that era as I wanted to put a speculative spin on it, but its still about an illegal underground pinball club.

Lifeline technology was illegal. It was also everywhere.

Days and weeks were sold in capsules on half the street corners, and crooked doctors would surreptitiously snatch months from car crash victims and cancer patients to sell on to anyone with too much money and not enough time.

Sammy had watched the lifeline on his palm shrink before his eyes. He had given a perfect sob story to a little old lady, and squandered the cash she gave him on slot machines and poker games. Once she found out the truth, she told her grandson, a jittery thug who broke into Sammy’s home and threatened to “sic the Deep Ones” on him. After an hour-long paranoid rant, one of his men pinned Sammy down and placed the LineTech on his finger.

It was such a simple-looking thing. The same size as a finger-pricking glucose meter, but instead of measuring sugar, it sapped life from him. Whatever cancer or heart issues had been in store for him many years in the future were now looming on the horizon. 

Lacking both money and a future, Sammy came up with a scheme to acquire both. There was an underground pinball club in the basement of a record shop where you could gamble your life away. He had never been there, but knew plenty of people who had, nearly always coming back with several weeks knocked off their lifespan. Unlike Sammy, they had never dared to cheat the system.

He picked a Saturday night to try his luck, hoping it was busy enough that no one would pay much attention to him. As he entered, the noise and flashing lights were almost overwhelming. Everyone's eyes were glittering with hope as they mashed the flipper buttons and watched the balls bounce off the bumpers and whizz up ramps.

Sammy marched up to the exchange counter as if he had visited a hundred times before.

“Two weeks, please.”

The attendant frowned.

“That’s only two tokens, sir. Are you sure? You’re unlikely to hit the jackpot with only two tries!”

“That’s all.”

The woman placed a LineTech machine on his finger, and Sammy tried not to recoil. His plan was nerve-wracking enough without having flashbacks to the thugs barging into his home. Once two weeks had been extracted from him, the woman handed him two tokens.

“Fingers crossed!” The woman grinned a little too widely. Sammy idly wondered if the attendants shared in any life profits.

Security guards slowly patrolled the floor, but Sammy noticed one of them spent more time chatting to female customers than paying attention to any ne’er-do-wells, and the other only patrolled half the room. He selected a pinball machine on the other half, near a group of haggard men too transfixed by their games to cause a ruckus. The men dressed as though they were in their twenties, but their drooping cheeks and the liver spots on their hands indicated they had wasted years gambling.

Sammy’s pinball machine was vampire themed, featuring blood red bumpers and painted bats on the field. The machine would spit out tokens based on a person’s score, and as every bumper was worth a few hours, people could delude themselves into believing they could profit from playing.

Sammy rummaged around in the bottom of his bag and pulled out a handful of identical looking tokens. He put one back to back with the real thing - they were the same size and had very similar grooves on the sides. A friend had saved a token from his disastrous outing the week before and made copies, but Sammy was the only one brave enough to give them a go.

He slipped a fake token in, watched the ball pop out, then pulled the plunger.

The next hour was a whirlwind of sound and colour. Sammy was so mesmerised by the machine he forgot he was using fake tokens. He forgot he was playing for life. All that mattered was the rewarding thumps and dings and flashing lights.

In the middle of his tenth game, a heavy hand gripped his shoulder. Sammy tried to squirm away, but didn’t take his eyes off the machine until he was yanked away. He could hear gasps from a player nearby, but no one else had even noticed what was happening.

“Think you’re so clever, don’t ya?” growled the security guard, his hand firmly clasped around Sammy’s arm. He marched Sammy across the room at such a pace he stumbled to keep up.

“I don’t, I don’t know what you…”

He trailed off as the guard pushed open a black door leading to a grey, unadorned corridor. Sammy could still hear the sounds of the machine, and some part of his brain tried to figure out if he could bounce the man off him and score more points. Instead, the man thrust him into another room with such strength he tripped and landed face first on the rug.

There were no bright lights or noise here, only a low chandelier and the ticking of a grandfather clock. It looked like a study, walls lined with weighty tomes, and a globe-shaped minibar beside a broad desk. Once Sammy pushed himself upright, he saw the figure seated behind the desk.

He assumed they were a man from their clothing and broad shoulders, but their face was unlike any adult’s face he had ever seen. Their plump cheeks glowed with youth, and not a single spot or freckle blemished their skin. Their whole body looked like that of an oversized baby; only their lusterless grey eyes aged them.

The person stretched out an arm and pointed at him. Sammy noticed the one thing that did mar their skin: a deep lifeline that ran down their palm, all the way along their arm and disappeared beneath their clothes.

“You.” The weary, raspy voice didn’t match their appearance. “You stole from me.”

What are your thoughts on Timeball? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. The setting is rather out of my comfort zone as I prefer to write things that are more fantastical. Is the ending still satisfying, even though what happens to Sammy isn’t resolved?

Shannon was in love with the lake, and the lake loved her. When she slipped into its cool embrace, she could hear it murmur:

“The toxic behaviour of past lovers forced me to harden my heart, but with your help, I can open up again.”

Shannon dove to the lake’s bed and pushed aside slimy slabs to reveal her lover’s quivering heart, as large as Shannon herself. She turned to rise to the surface, but a dark tendril slipped out of the beating mass, coiled round her ankle and caressed her thigh.

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t seek air.”

I started two stories last week, but didn’t get past 500 words on either of them, so I thought I’d post this in lieu of something more substantial. I swear one day I will get into a routine! Going forward I’ll try to post two stories a week on set days - I’ll have a think on what days work best.

I’m also going to take out the numbering from my story titles, although I’ll keep count separately so I know how many stories I’ve done so far this year. This one is #42.

If you want to read another one of my 100 word stories, check out Finnegan’s Arch.

What are your thoughts on The Lake's Lover? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

After a decade slaving away on the factory floor, I have only just enough savings to travel to the Capital and rent a room for a month. A month is all I need.

The king has been put to the fire and the dukes and duchesses of old have been brought low, cast out onto the streets to shiver and beg like the rest of us. The Chittering Queen has changed things. She crawled through a crack between worlds and tore down the unnatural hierarchy, leaving a gap for me to rise through the ranks and become someone.

She needs human advisors, does she not? She needs to know who else ought to be ripped apart, and I know the people who have been left unpunished. The factory owner who broke apart the union. The pompous lawyers who did nothing when my daughter died. The duke who snatched my father’s land. Her minions map out our realm and report back, but only someone like me can help her comprehend our culture.

I nurse the viciousness that has sprouted inside me. What can I offer a queen that has everything? Art feels like the only answer: a grotesque blend of both our worlds that will prove to her I am worthy.

The basement I rent in the capital provides no view of the city, but I stroll through the streets and admire the Queen’s handiwork. Entire city blocks have been warped. The walls mould over with greens and pinks, and within I can hear discordant chirps and rustling and the sound of a hundred insect wings beating. Most of the Queen’s minions are no bigger than a hand. Sometimes a few skitter out and their translucent bodies take flight, leaving behind green miasmic plumes. The cobblestones are sticky with their excretions and I have to dart about to avoid dirtying my boots.

I seek the son of the duke who stole what should have been my inheritance. In taverns I cosy up to the fools with rebellion brewing in their hearts and extract from them the whereabouts of the old leaders. The duke is dead, I am told, and his eldest son, a mere teenager, is now solely responsible for his terrified siblings. What will impress the Queen more, I wonder - depriving the family of their eldest and strongest, or plucking out their youngest and most vulnerable for my art?

I spend a week stalking the family. I even exchange idle chit-chat with the eldest son at the run-down bakery he frequents, although I do not eat the speckled bread on offer. Nothing is left untouched, the young man moans. He hopes the resistance can seal the crack between worlds and thus starve her powers.

A few nights later, I catch him staggering out of a tavern, having eked out what little pleasure he can now that his wealth has been rightfully taken from him. We have a tussle, but after I smother him with a concoction of my own creation, he is rendered powerless. I hoist him onto a cart and trundle back to my basement. 

Once there, I tie him to a wooden board and get to work. He does not know why he has been chosen, and I do not explain. If my neighbours hear his muffled screams, they don’t dare take action. 

His skin puckers when I smear it with mould I have scraped from buildings. I stitch insect wings to his arms, gathered from the corpses of the Queen’s minions I have chanced upon. I pray she sees it as a glorification and not as a sacrilege. Finally, I pierce the soft flesh at the base of his mouth, through which I position the mechanism from my daughter’s music box. The drum sits on his tongue, the winding key juts out below his jaw.

The blood loss is too great and the boy perishes, although I suspect the Queen will appreciate a corpse even more than a live specimen.

My masterpiece complete, I haul his body to the palace - a once shining jewel, now blackened and decayed. As I approach, I realise it is not merely mould that covers it, but thick vines that pulsate like arteries, and a pungent dark liquid that seeps through unseen gaps. The place is unguarded, its appearance deemed all that is necessary to ward off intruders.

I tremble. The palace exudes power. I have shrugged off the old shackles of morality and social order, but making an offering to the Queen is a step into the unknown, and a reward is not guaranteed. But what alternative is there? I have spent my life cowed, contorting myself to suit others, never daring to ask for anything in return. Together, the Chittering Queen and I can reform this world.

One of her creatures beckons me with its spindly limbs. I follow, dragging my art behind me. The air grows humid, and thick vines cross over the windows, blocking most of the light. I can hear high-pitched chirps from all around, and every few seconds the ground quivers. I realise the vines are not mere decorations, but an extension of the Queen’s body. The deeper into the palace I go, the denser they become, creeping through floorboards and bursting through ceilings.

In the throne room, I find the Queen’s writhing mass. Her seaweed green limbs slip over one another, and tangled far above my head are features from the kingdom’s previous ruler - a slimy throne, a broken statue, and a wriggling advisor riddled with holes.

Chittering sounds drown out my thoughts. I don’t know how much time passes until I manage to shout over the cacophony.

“I have come to pledge my allegiance to you, my Queen.” My voice is not as stable as I would like. “I offer up this gift, a young human I have transformed for your pleasure.”

I prostrate myself before her and await her response. The chittering quietens for a moment.

“Very good. I accept your gift.” Her voice is deep and slick. A limb lashes out from the mass and picks up the boy’s body. “I welcome you into the fold.”

In front of me, limbs part and form an archway. Beyond, there is only darkness. Something oozes out of it like ink and pools around my boots. The Queen sits atop the crack between worlds, I realise. Why would it be here? What did the old king do to rend reality? 

“Come into the fold, friend. Come.”

All other thoughts are banished. The chittering becomes harmonious as I sway on the threshold. I do not know what the future holds, but I hope that I get what I am owed.

I’ve had very little focus this week so this took me far longer than it should have. Still, I’m pleased with the end result. It’s unlikely I’ll write a second story this week though.

I’m never sure if this type of story falls under horror. I think of horror as having lots of moments of high tension and trying to evoke fear and dread, but I aim more for a quiet discomfort and perhaps mild disgust. Is it closer to horror than fantasy?

What are your thoughts on How to Win Over the Chittering Queen? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

It has been a good week. I didn’t meet my writing goal (a story every weekday) but I socialised, left the house almost every day, and generally feel more relaxed and less inclined to watch bad TV - I watched Taskmaster instead! I also picked up my juggling balls for the first time in weeks. I’m very much a novice in juggling - I can do the standard three ball cascade and I’m just working on under the leg and “The W”, following the Taylor Tries juggling tutorials.

My writing this week has been…fine. My favourite piece was Concrete and Flesh, about a woman who has left a cult and is talking to a reporter about her experiences. I think its the first non-speculative fiction I’ve written for this Substack, although I’ve written a couple of other things with culty elements.

My other stories this week were Out on a Limb (for the Fictionistas March prompt) which is fine but didn’t meet my hopes for it, and Char, which is also just…fine. I’ll put my more thorough musings about them at the end for people who are interested.

Interesting reads this week

• Easy Prey by Sara Pauff - I haven’t read all the other stories from the Fictionistas March prompt (yet!), but this one was my favourite of what I did read. I really enjoyed the friction between the two selves of the character, and the fear that one is being consumed by the other. The way the “beautiful but useless” element of the prompt was worked in was excellent.

• The Complaint by A E Deakin - I loved the emotional stiffness of the character and I think the author has a great gift for creating humour at the intersection between the banal and the dark!

• The Day I Burned by Shaina Read - There are some lovely phrases in this short story.

Non-Fiction

• Met Police report: five findings from Casey review - A depressing news article about behaviour within the Metropolitan Police (the police for greater London). I find it interesting what they choose to use as a subheading vs what is in the body of the article, but I suppose they have to choose some things to highlight.

• What a man freed from a 241-year prison sentence finds strangest of all - Bobby Bostic was 16 when he was charged with armed robbery and given an incredibly long prison sentence. The article touches on his feelings having left prison and how the judge who sentenced him ended up being an advocate for him in his parole hearing.

Pen name angst

Earlier this week I woke up and wondered "Why on earth did I choose V L Augustin as my pen name?” It doesn’t at all relate to my real name, which feels odd. I really like the letter V as it sounds strong and decisive (victory, vim, vigour) but I don’t care for any of the common (female) names that go with it. I decided to switch to M (my real first initial) to feel a little more in line with it, although as a letter it feels a bit wishy-washy to me (meek, mealy-mouthed, miserly, morose).

Then I was angsting about the surname. I chose it because it feels connected to Emperor Augustus, but having a surname that isn’t Greek feels a bit weird. My real surname is Greek, and I vaguely feel like I should “represent” that side of me. I did ask my dad for his mother’s maiden name - it began with V and I like it, but its also a mouthful and probably harder for people to remember or spell. I also feel that although I’m half Greek, I am culturally only English, really, and I worry it’s wrong in some way to take on a different Greek name. I don’t even speak any Greek, aside from hello, how are you, thank you, etc. At most I eat more Greek food than the average English person, and I visit Greece every so often as my dad lives there.

I did angst a little about Augustin as a surname as well. It looks like it comes from France and central Europe, although I feel like it’s diffused enough across different places that it isn’t inappropriate, and it ultimately comes from Latin anyway.

So I’ve changed my Substack name to be M L Augustin, and I think I’ll stick with it?

Frequency angst

I had planned to write five stories this week, and ended up writing three - I missed one because I was socialising, and the other because I didn’t feel like it. I still can’t decide how often I want to publish short stories here (now that I’m no longer doing a story a day), so I thought I’d muse about the pros and cons and put up a poll.

For the reader, greater frequency means… more stories to read! That could be a good thing or a bad thing for you. In theory you would think if I just wrote two stories a week they would be higher quality than five stories a week, but I think there’s a possibility that pushing myself to write more results in more chances that a story is engaging, even if I also write some dross. Fewer stories means your inbox is bombarded less.

As a writer, I think its good to flex my creative muscles as much as possible, and while that doesn’t mean I need to throw everything on my Substack, I think I might end up feeling paralyzed by perfectionism again. So far this year I’ve written some stories here that I’ve really liked, even though they were written in a day. More stories may also mean more chances for potential subscribers to see them and decide to subscribe, although it could mean fewer of them actually bother to read them.

Fewer stories means I could start working on longer pieces - either longer short stories, or a long-term project like a novella or a text-based game. If I just published two stories a week here, I could also take time to craft a third story to submit to fiction magazines. I keep talking about wanting to move away from flash fiction, although now I think its become a somewhat comforting zone.

I need to mentally transition from scribbling down a quick story to being able to maintain focus/interest in a piece for longer than a day. Weirdly that sounds more challenging than just writing five stories a week. Challenge is good, but if I fail then I’ve just got a bunch of half-written stories and end up having nothing to to actually show off.

Musings on this week’s stories

Out on a Limb

• The prompt had to include a slacker who steals cats, something beautiful but useless and something wrong with the water, all in under 1000 words. I’m happy that I managed that, but I think it suffers for trying to stick to the word count.

• My original word count before editing was about 1300, and had some more flavourful tidbits about the grandmother, the relationship with the siblings, a brief reflection on why both a servant and a lover had gone “missing”. The story as it stands is creative I suppose, but the character and her relationship with others isn’t as fleshed out as I’d like it to be.

• I’m also not sure about the inclusion of vomit… It felt right at the time, but I know a lot of people aren’t keen on vomit and neither am I. It suits the grotesqueness of the chopped up body, but it could have been she just felt nauseous, and parts of the map seemed to blur (and thus she decides the area that didn’t is where her father’s body is kept).

• The paragraphs around cats, and just after that, feel a little choppy. I think I could have made a smoother transition from using cats as a conduit to using herself. I also didn’t need to take the prompt quite so literally - stealing a cat once would probably be sufficient to fit “steals cats”.

• Her desire to “prove her worth” near the end doesn’t quite sit well with the rest of the piece. It implies she seeks unity with her siblings, rather than some sort of outsider status, or superiority even, or else that their approval is irrelevant to her own wants. I think there could be slightly more focus on the semi-religious aspect of her wanting the corpse to be reunited and have proper rites.

Concrete and Flesh

• The story is more dialogue-heavy than I’d like, but I think it touches on some things that I wanted it to - the different but similar ways you can divulge parts of your life (manipulator vs therapist vs reporter), the transitionary phase once you have fallen out with someone (still obsessed with what Eve thinks of her, still not wanting to dishonour her), and the guilt that comes from engaging with that sort of environment. I think it could do with being a little longer so it can dive more into those aspects.

• There’s little physicality in the beginning - the part about washing up feels crowbarred in, and is the only place where part of the conversation is referred to rather than used as dialogue, which feels clunky. It should either be more than once or not at all.

• I did mention after the story I wasn’t sure about the reporter, who is just bland and has no character. Other people thought it didn’t matter, but for me I either want a) to somehow be explicit that it is the main character’s perspective that makes him seem bland, or b) give him some colour somehow, have him mention why it interests him (part of his family coming from a cult/cult-like environment?) or be more reassuring, or else seem hungry for sensationalism.

• One commenter mentioned it could have the main character think about why they agreed to do the interview, which I agree with. I imagine other ex-members are speaking out and so she feels pushed to do so, either explicitly told she should or just a nagging sense that she has a duty to do so. Currently its all internal conflict, and I think that could introduce something a little external - friction between her and other ex-members, even if it’s just in her head.

• The ending is a little rushed, but I like the last line.

Char

• It’s fine. As with most stories I liked it more in my head than written out. The writing is a little clunky. Also I struggled with the title!

• I think the relationship between Sonia and Carolina needs to be more fleshed out, as well as how Sonia came to be in the position she is in. I vaguely imagine Sonia having been a sex worker or an entertainer (“plaything”), and revealing her power to Carolina is how she ends up having the bizarre role she does.

• I only realised after I wrote it that it bears similarities to Out on a Limb, namely that a mixture can be used on the body to invoke a power (this time for real). I even started out thinking she would eat the mixture, then I realised that made it far too similar.

• I think the story is less effective by having it be Carolina’s thugs who start the fire. Who started the fire is irrelevant really, it could just have been a cooking accident, the point is that Carolina is in some way responsible because she was in a position to stop the buildings being built like that, but didn’t. Instead of the thugs, I think I’d add some line about Carolina taking bribes from landlords regarding improperly built tenements.

• At the same time… The whole thing feels a little heavy-handed, too explicitly leftist “Landlords are bad, politicians are bad, boo.”

• I did ponder over the last line a bit. I left it as "You did." Sonia snarled and leapt to her feet. I was thinking maybe she explicitly attacks Carolina (flings some ash into her eyes? Grapples her to the ground and pushes her face into the ash?) but it felt more unfinished that way.

I still don’t know what to call these weekly reflection posts. I like the idea of having a specific name, but “Weekly Friction” is too negative, “Sunday musings” is too wishy-washy and “[Something] reflections” is too self-important. What should I call them?

Sonia tiptoed across the charred rubble that was once her neighbourhood. No building remained intact. Collapsed ceilings buried burnt furniture, children’s toys, and unrecovered corpses. Newly stray dogs howled as they pottered around the now unfamiliar landscape, and an acrid stench pervaded the streets for a mile around.

“Tell me! Tell me what happened to this place,” Carolina demanded. She had wrapped her shawl around her mouth to protect her from the ash that scattered every time the wind picked up. “I remember it being so vibrant every time I passed it in my litter. So many colourful clothes were hung up on the lines, and the children used to run around singing such strange, enchanting songs."

Sonia saw Carolina wipe away tears. She bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from expressing anything that might poison their relationship, which was already as precarious as the scorched steps winding up the outside of the nearest building. Carolina had never set foot in the district, of that Sonia was certain. She had at most seen it from afar as she travelled to one of the wealthier districts. Sonia was probably the first person the woman had met who had grown up in the neighbourhood.

Sonia's mother had only survived the fire by diving out of her window on the top floor of her tenement, earning herself a broken leg in the process. Instead of being by her side, Sonia had come to the destroyed neighbourhood as Carolina had promised to pay any of her mother's medical costs. Guilt clawed at her. A week ago, she had gently suggested to her mother that she move into Sonia's own apartment across the city. When her mother refused, Sonia should have insisted. She pushed such thoughts aside and forced herself to be the passionless person Carolina expected her to be.

"Don't know, but the buildings are so cramped together it would be impossible to stop the fire spreading once it started."

"Can't you just… do your thing?" Carolina gestured to Sonia’s leg.

Sonia turned away so the woman wouldn't see her scowl. She had mentioned her power to Carolina months before, and now it was all that mattered to her. Sonia had once just been her plaything, but now she was her prized investigator. Time and time again, Carolina demanded she drop everything else and help her out. Self-hatred often flared up inside her, but the money was too good to refuse.

Sonia dutifully walked over to what had once been a tiny garden. The soil and shoots were now blanketed by ash. She scooped up the filth and poured a little water from her water-skin on it to form a paste. Then she pulled up her trouser leg, exposing the dark, indented birthmark that snaked up her calf, and spread the mixture over it.

Faces and screams and flickering flames flashed before Sonia's eyes and her leg seared with a familiar pain. She winced, but tried to focus.

One man swam to the forefront of her vision. She recognised his rat-like face and excessive jewelled rings: Marcellus, a political rival of Carolina. She saw him hiding in a dirty top-floor apartment, his expression one of terror. Down below, four thugs marched through the dark streets with torches, pulling people aside to question them. Their faces were familiar too - Carolina’s henchmen. They laughed as they torched the block Marcellus was hiding in. Marcellus fled, and the thugs ran after him, ignoring the flames that licked the wall of the tottering tenement and spread to the next one. Shouts rang out, but those on the eighth floor of a block had no means to escape once the flames reached the stairs. The nearest barracks equipped to deal with large fires was a district away, and sluggish to respond. Bells rang and dogs howled as the fire engulfed the community.

Sonia curled up on the ground, her body aching. She gritted her teeth so hard her head began to ache, too. Her employer may not have lit the fire, but she was happy to hire people who had no qualms about it. She also knew Carolina had vetoed a motion to punish landlords who built tenements too high in order to squeeze out a little more profit. Once the rubble was cleared away, those who bought the land would no doubt do exactly the same.

"So? What happened?" Carolina said, nudging her with her foot.

"You did." Sonia snarled and leapt to her feet.

I skipped yesterday’s story because I was busy. I figure I won’t be too strict about writing every weekday now that I’ve proven I can write fairly consistently and also bounce back from a lull.

If you’re interested, here’s an article about The Firefighters of Ancient Rome.

What are your thoughts on the story? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. To me there’s something a little heavy-handed about it.

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What prompted you to join?" My interviewer has a tone and expression I would have considered warm and kind in the past, but now it sets my teeth on edge. I'd prefer if he was cold and clinical. Hell, I'd prefer if he was angry, or bored, or disgusted by me. I try to tolerate his kindness. It isn't his fault.

"A messy breakup, I guess." He nods as an invitation to go on. I’ve already practised what I want to say and what I want to avoid, and spent most of last night rephrasing things over and over in my head. "I lost my whole friendship group, just gone, like that. Then I came across a post online about The Retreat and I thought, yeah, I need a little holiday, digital detox and all that.”

“So it started out as a weekend retreat.”

“Yeah. Sort of. Four days.”

I dig my nail into the wooden kitchen table, running over the same groove I’ve already made. We’re sat in my parent’s kitchen, two years since that weekend. Now I’m just a thirty-five-year-old woman living back with her parents and struggling to do anything with myself. I used to think I was so fucking enlightened.

“How was it?”

“Magical. That’s how I felt about it at the time. I met all these new people, all so kind and thoughtful and…huggy. I met Eve on my first day, and she was encouraging, she made me feel valued. I look back on it now and I can see it was all textbook love bombing.” I talk to him with such certainty, parroting all the stock phrases that people lap up. When I look back on it, I see confused people trying their best. Plus Eve.

“Eve - you mean Kirsty Springall?”

I flinch, then try to turn it into a shrug. Kirsty Springall is such a mundane name. Even though it's been months since I last saw her, even though I’m working through all my feelings and “making good progress”, according to my therapist, using Eve’s real name feels like I’d be dishonouring her. I feel as if she might hear me and be repulsed by me and by what I’ve become: an outsider.

“Yeah. She went with a Biblical name. So tacky, now I think of it,” is all I say.

“That level of attention from strangers, I think that would feel seductive to many people. So how did things move on from there?” he asks.

“I got messages from the people I met there, saying they’d love to see me again, and that I’d be the perfect candidate to be a permanent resident there. All the messages were on Eve’s say so, but I didn’t know it at the time. Later, when I was a member, whenever she liked someone, she would get all of us to message them. Sometimes she’d tell us what to say, or else prompt us, like, ‘Oh, she mentioned she used to have an eating disorder, you should talk about your eating problems too’. It was all about tapping into vulnerabilities. I had shared stuff about my love life over the weekend, because… because other people were doing it, and it just felt like such a different environment. It felt open. So I got messages about that.”

Eve had made it seem all about connecting with people. I wasn’t being manipulative when I messaged a bulimic to say I had also been bulimic. I was helping the woman to open up, to heal her. I still can’t work out which is true.

“My housing situation was tricky after the breakup,” I continue. “I was left paying the full rent, which I couldn’t really afford, but I struggled to find somewhere new. It just felt like it made sense to move in there. Everyone seemed to genuinely appreciate my company, and the whole lifestyle appealed to me.”

“I get that. I used to live in a commune back in the noughties. I ended up moving on, but that kind of connection with nature and with other people isn’t something you get with standard living arrangements.”

“I had never grown stuff before!” I laugh. Those moments in the garden are still the ones I treasure the most - the sun warming my skin, nurturing the little green shoots that sprung from seeds I had planted, chatting about anything and everything with Piotr while fixing the fences. It’s a hobby that’s stuck. My parent’s garden looks a lot more colourful now.

“When did you start to grow uneasy about the place, or doubt the way Kirsty - Eve - was running it?”

“There was no set moment. I mean, even at the very beginning, I questioned some things. Eve would always find some way to touch me when we spoke - a hug, or just a little tap on the shoulder, or something. It was strange, but I didn’t want to say, like, ‘don’t touch me’. There was nothing sexual about it to clarify. I don’t think so, anyway. She always spoke about how we’ve moved so much into the digital world that our physical needs have been pushed to the side. So she was very encouraging of hugging, and of holding our hands when we were in the circle.”

“In the circle?”

“Meditation circle.” I say, then remember that it wasn’t what most people think of when they think of meditation. “She - she used that word, but it was more just a, a, um… Discussion circle. Just, whatever.”

“What did you discuss?”

“It was, I mean, that was one of the things that I was uneasy about. Not to begin with, I think. Sorry, do you want any more tea, coffee, water or anything? We’ve got biscuits too. Mum bought some digestives yesterday.”

He shakes his head. Silence stretches out between us, reminding me both of some of my therapy sessions and of the circle. Silence makes me scratch my arms, and if I’m not careful, I can do it for minutes at a time without realising. He wants me to go on talking, and I feel like I must have done something wrong. Silence doesn’t feel safe. I think he judges me, this reporter, for being so foolish as to join a cult, for thinking Eve was anything other than a narcissist. His readers will judge me too. I’ve asked him to use a pseudonym for me so I don’t get any unpleasant messages, but I don’t think I will manage to resist reading everyone’s opinions. I’m not coming across as a likeable person.

“It’s okay. If you want to go back to a different topic, then that’s fine.” His voice is gentle. It grates on me. “Let’s talk more about the friends you made there.”

“I’m just gonna…” I gesture to the corridor, then slip away from the table to the bathroom.

I’m crying now. My mum would say, let it all out. Eve would say that too. So many things Eve said meant something slightly different. It wouldn’t just mean to let myself cry and talk about why I’m crying, it meant to offer up all the things I’ve ever cried about - arguments with Dad about alcohol, stupid work mistakes, stupid sexual mistakes, grieving over my cat, the shame of grieving more over my cat than my grandmother. Eve has made me want to be the opposite of who I was when I was with her - I want to be repressed, I want to build up high walls, I want to never love again.

I open up a breathing app and sit on the toilet seat for two minutes, watching the bubble on my phone expand and contract with every breath. Then I return to the reporter, still sniffling, but calm enough, or repressed enough, to continue.

“We had the circle every morning and night, and we would hold hands and talk about whatever came to mind.” I say this before I’ve sat down, and before he has a chance to ask if I’m okay. I speak fast to get it out of the way. “Eve guided it, and she’d break down every emotion we had until it was about something else entirely. We weren’t upset that someone hadn’t followed the cleaning rota, we were ashamed that our parents didn’t keep a clean house and thus didn’t care about our wellbeing and didn’t really love us. If we disagreed, then we were in denial. Sometimes it would end up with all of us turning on one person and repeating what Eve was saying. We’d tell them, with love and affection, that they were wrong about their own feelings. I did it as much as anyone else.”

The reporter looks taken aback by my bitter tone. 

“Do you mind if I do these while we talk?” I gesture to the dirty pans in the sink. I can’t keep still any more.

He agrees, and our conversation becomes lighter. I answer his questions about the friends I’ve made. Piotr and Ciara have both left, and I still talk to them sometimes. My closest friend, Marie, is still at The Retreat. I avoid talking about her. 

When the washing up is done, and my fingers have turned pruney, I sit back down. I know he wants to move to more difficult topics.

“What compelled you to leave?” He asks.

“She introduced a new practice, about a year after I joined. The others probably told you about it.” I know he’s interviewed Ciara at least, and I suspect he’s been in contact with others.

“I could guess, but I want you to tell your story in your own words. I don’t want to take that away from you.”

“She called it Oneness. Or going to the Oneness room. I only went there - was forced there - twice. It took me another two months after the first time until I left, but that was essentially the reason I left.” 

I feel an unpleasant ripple of shame. I can imagine Eve reading the article, and seeing me say I was forced. She would be disgusted by me. Maybe she’d say I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own choices. I still struggle to use that word, force. It brings to mind the image that she frogmarched to the room. Sometimes I dance around the word when I think about the horrific things I was cajoled into saying in the circle. I did have a choice. I could have risked the consequences and refused to say or do what she wanted. I could have left The Retreat earlier. The fact that I quit at all proves that I had a choice, but I just kept making the wrong one, over and over.

“It was a tiny basement. You could only get there by… I guess you’d call it a trapdoor. You’d get down via a little rope ladder, and once you went down, she would pull it up and close the door. There was no light, and nothing else in the room. There wasn't quite enough space to stretch out both your arms." I stretch my arms to the side as I say this, mimicking what I had done when I was trapped in there. When I look up, I see he’s nodding with an expression of vague concern. I realise I have only told him about the dimensions and he's looking for something more emotional. I open my mouth to offer up some vulnerability, but I can't find the words. It’s easier to explain why I joined than why I left, even though to the rest of the world leaving is the choice that makes sense.

He breaks the silence.

"What were you feeling when you were in that room?"

“Scared. Lonely. Betrayed, to be honest. Both times, everyone encouraged me to go there. They said it would be healing, over and over they said it, making it sound like I would be a permanent mess if I didn’t do it. I had said the same thing to other people, before and after. The first time wasn’t so bad, it was just a couple of hours. The second time… I had questioned something Eve had said in the circle. Someone else backed me up. She didn’t like that.”

“So she made you go there again?”

I give an empty laugh and bite the dry skin off my lips.

“I chose. Or she made me, sure. I don’t know. It was just twenty-four hours, and people think, oh, twenty-four hours, I’ve spent that long in bed when I’m ill. No problem, it's just a day. But there's, there's nothing there." I try to steady my breathing. I sound pathetic, complaining about being in the dark for a day. Ciara was there for two days once, no food or water. The world seems small now. My parent’s kitchen doesn’t feel real. “There’s no, there’s no anchor there. I can’t see, I can’t hear. She makes us go there naked because clothes are a barrier to our true selves, so I don’t even get to feel the texture of what I’m wearing. There’s just the concrete walls, concrete floor, and my own flesh. And the smell. And there’s no way to tell the time. I can’t sleep naked on concrete. I’m just timeless, out of time, forever there with nothing. I should be meditating. I feel guilty I’m not being at one with myself or whatever the fuck it is I’m supposed to be doing. It should be an opportunity but I’m just scared and trying to work out how long there is left and -”

My interviewer reaches his hand out across the table and I jolt. Only then do I realise I've been digging my nails into my arm. Curved red welts blossom. 

I chuckle and wave my hand, as if I can wave away his concern.

"Concrete and flesh. That's all I could feel."

It's more than I meant to say. It’s more than Eve would want me to say. I start to feel like the interviewer is no better than her. He’s just trying to extract information out of me to use as a cautionary tale for some bullshit article. I am lost in the extraction. I feel like a sequence of salacious events instead of a person. 

Our conversation peters out after that. I don’t want to tell him to leave, but I no longer want him there. He asks about the mechanics of leaving, about the people still there, but after a few one word answers he gives up and offers to finish up any further questions over email.

“Yeah. Sounds good.” I say, but I’m no longer sure I’ll reply. 

I wonder how much of my outburst will make it into the article. I wonder if Eve will see through the pseudonym the reporter uses and know I spoke to him. Every single day since I left, I wonder what Eve thinks of me.

My original intention was to focus on the way familiar words are redefined within a cult, but I didn’t end up going down that route much.

The ending feels rushed to me - I always struggle with endings, especially when I’m writing late. There’s also more dialogue than I intended. I can’t decide if it bothers me that the reporter has no personality of his own.

What are your thoughts on Concrete and Flesh? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

This is a short story written for Fictionistas March edition of The Great Substack Prompt Celebration. This month’s prompt had to include a slacker who steals cats, something beautiful but useless and something wrong with the water. Tricky!

Warning for vomit at the end.

The rebels carved up my father and are sending him home piece by piece. His right foot was dropped off outside the castle first, then his calf and now his thigh, wrapped up in hide along with a taunting note. 

My siblings crowd round the map in the war room, planning assaults on all known enemy camps. As the youngest of eight, I learned long ago that I would never be the strongest or fastest or bravest, so I have never bothered to pick up a sword. While they discuss tactics and push tokens around the map, I make shadow puppets on the wall to entertain myself. The others talk as if our father might still be alive, but I know he is dead already. Battle does not interest me, only recovering his body does. 

"What about you, Ingrid? Are you going to do your damn duty?" Brun asks. All eyes turn to me. 

“You should buy some pretty figurines instead of those dull wooden chips,” I say, ignoring his question.

Several of my sisters look at me in disgust and shake their heads. I slouch off down the winding staircase and breathe in the fresh evening air in the courtyard.

I‘ve hatched my own plan to find my father’s body. Instead of weapons training, I have spent my youth thumbing through my grandmother’s grimoire and one ritual she describes helps find missing people. Cats, she wrote, are particularly attune to the invisible threads of fate, and thus with a little encouragement will lead a spellcaster to their target. 

I first used the ritual a year ago to find a missing servant. The kitchen staff foiled my attempt to capture the castle cat, so I stalked the town streets at night and trapped one with some salmon as bait. I brought it back to my rooms, waved herbs around it and fed it more fish with my servant’s hair sprinkled on top. When I let it loose again in town, it merely led me back to its home. I hammered on every door on the street just in case, but I never found the servant. 

A few months later, I stole another cat to hunt down a missing lover, but it died from the concoction I fed it. I had a taxidermist stuff it after it passed away and now the beautiful tabby sits on my dresser in a fierce pose. 

My father claimed he would exile me if I stole any more animals. I’ve been told the citizens no longer like me very much. 

It seems wrong to replicate the ritual my father had forbidden me from practising, but I cannot let his corpse remain asunder. The only option is to attune myself to the psychic planes.

I take my father’s thigh from the cool storeroom where it is being kept until the whole body can be reunited and burnt. Back in my room, I place it in a basin of water and press down on it to ensure some of my father’s essence is released. Dried blood floats away from the discoloured limb and tinges the water pink, and a faint smell of rot emanates from it. Wrinkling my nose, I remove the limb, sprinkle some herbs into the mixture, and add a few drops of my own blood. I stir it three times clockwise, then chant the unfamiliar words my grandmother scrawled down.

There is no clap of thunder or whispering voices to tell me I have performed the ritual correctly. I scoop up some of the potion into a leather waterskin and pray I have done everything right.

Night has truly fallen now, and I walk through the castle with a lantern in my outstretched arm. Guards narrow their eyes at me as I pass - my presence makes them uneasy. I step back up the winding stairs to the war room.

The room is dark and silent, but the map is still unrolled on the table. My siblings are elsewhere in the castle, preparing to leave in the morning to whichever rebel camp the scouts say is most likely keeping my father’s decaying body. I can be the one to give my siblings certainty and save them time. I can be the one to ensure his body receives the proper funeral rites. Perhaps my siblings will even let me lead the funeral procession once I have proven my worth.

I run a finger over the coarse map, then gulp down the potion.

The herbs do not disguise the taste of blood and rot in the mixture. Each swallow is more vile than the last, but I force myself to drain the waterskin. My burp tastes even worse. I take some deep breaths in the hopes it will settle my churning stomach.

I look at the map again, praying that I suddenly feel a great connection to some village or forest or patch of land. No great understanding stirs within me.

“What are you doing here? The guards mentioned you’ve been sneaking around.”

Brun stands in the doorway, arms folded.

“Not sneaking. Walking. I live here just the same as you do.” I suddenly feel unsteady on my feet and lean on the table to stop myself from slumping to the floor. “I’m looking to help you, if you must know. I’m trying to work out where father’s body is being kept.” 

“Body? He’s alive for all you know! If you’re not coming with us you’ve got no business being here.”

“I can find -” I heave, then press my hand against my mouth. It is no good. I heave again, and vomit erupts from my mouth and sprays all over the map. I find myself shaking, and Brun makes a noise of disgust.

“What on -”

“There.” I say, with as much confidence as I can muster. I point towards a village where much of my regurgitated dinner has ended up. “That’s where you’ll find father’s body.”

What are your thoughts on Out on a Limb? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

I have 1.5 series left of Lost to watch.

I go through these “dead moth” phases sometimes, especially in early spring when everything feels difficult. It’s at least partly due to having lower Vitamin D from the lack of sunshine, and perhaps just some subconscious brain process that decides “February to April has been Hard in the Past and will be Hard in the Future”. I’m doing relatively well compared to other years, but I have spent most of the last week vegetating and watching more Lost. I don’t recommend the show, to clarify - there are many, many better shows, it’s just pleasant to lounge in front of it.

I started both stories I had planned for this week, but didn’t finish either of them.

My plan going forward is to write a story every weekday, and then either publish it on Substack, or, if I like it, keep it back to edit at the weekend and try to submit to magazines (I’ve still never done it). So, in theory, five stories a week. Still a tiny minimum of 100 words per day, and if that’s all I do then c’est la vie! I won’t stick to the idea that a story has to be started and finished on the same day, just that I should post one a day. That way if I am filled with vigour I could write something long over the weekend.

I am not filled with vigour right now though, so I’ll probably write a bunch of flash fiction this upcoming week instead.

I have spent most of this week re-watching Lost. It’s a fascinating TV show to me because so much of it is just the writers winging it - introducing mysteries for the sake of mysteries, resolving some things and giving up on others, making connections between characters to give an air of intrigue even though it often didn’t matter, whole story arcs that seem to just be to pad out a series, and so on. One of the main characters (Jack) was originally supposed to die in the pilot episode, although at least the change was made before it was filmed. Another character, Ben, was only supposed to appear in three episodes, but the producers liked the actor so much that his character becomes a central antagonist. There is so much that is utterly stupid, inconsistent and frustrating about the show, and yet I’m mesmerised by it.

…By which I mean, I haven’t done any writing since Tuesday.

I have two stories in mind for next week, I suppose we’ll see if I end up procrastinating over them. One is for the Fictionistas Prompt of the Month - the story has to involve a slack who steals cats, something beautiful yet useless, and something has to be wrong with the water… In under a thousand words! I have something in mind, though I don’t know how coherent it will be.

My second story involves someone leaving a cult. I have already run into the problem of having too much time to think about it, and thus I yet again find myself worrying “can I do this idea justice?!” I’ll hopefully push through and write it towards the end of the week.

I have read very little this week, and none of it was worth recommending. Now that I’m no longer writing a story a day I’m not sure whether to skip the musings I was doing in my previous Sunday posts, as hopefully going forward my stories will be more polished. I only wrote two stories this week anyway, #36: The Waterfall Sisters and #37: Ancestral Memories, both of which were flash fiction.

I still like the idea of having a weekly reflections post, even if it isn’t about specific stories. This week’s offering is obviously very lacklustre as I’ve mostly taken a rest from writing, but I should be more engaging in the future.

What would you find interesting or valuable in a weekly round-up/reflection post?

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Yesterday I didn’t write a story. I probably won’t write one today either, or at least not finish it. I do have a story in mind, but I feel like the story a day project has come to the end of its usefulness to me.

I wrote 37 short stories in 37 days, which is an extraordinary feat for me. I usually squeeze out about two stories a year and I’ve never before put my short stories online or submitted them to magazines. But in the last month and a bit, I’ve written in different genres, from a sci-fi story set on a generation ship to flash fiction body horror to non-fiction about my dad going to prison. I’ve written in different styles, from epistolary to instructional to dark fairy tale. I’ve written itty bitty 100 word stories up to a 5457 word story in a day.

I could still salvage the project by writing two stories today, or three stories tomorrow, and thus the end result would be the same. But I’m not going to.

Why I’m not sticking to 100 stories in 100 days

I’m tired.

Despite writing every day I haven’t quite formed a habit. Most days I ignore my writing alarm and procrastinate, leaving it until 10pm or later to start writing. Thus most of my free time is spent being aware I should write but not actually doing it. It’s difficult to change a lifetime of not having habits, and it’s difficult not to stress when I see the hours ticking away knowing I still haven’t written the required story. I can’t relax.

I don’t want writing to be a chore.

I imagine doing anything consistently means that thing will occasionally be a chore. There’s been a few times when I’ve initially pushed myself to write and then I’ve reached a flow state, or else mulled over a piece in a way that feels comfortable. Now I’m getting to the point where it feels more often a chore than not, and that doesn’t sit right with me.

I want to feel satisfied.

In the last couple of weeks most of the stories I’ve put up have been under 1000 words. I don’t hate most of them (a concise piece of writing is cool) but I generally don’t find the process of writing something so short to be satisfying. It means flinging out a cool idea without actually dwelling on it and without digging down into characters and the level of intimacy you can get from longer stories.

There are also several stories I’ve written that I have zero interest in. They were just written for the sake of meeting my target. Why clog up my substack with that? Just because a story a day looks impressive?

There are other stories I really liked, but rushed to get them done. With everything I’ve written so far, the most editing I’ve done is reading through the story once and tweaking a few words here and there. It’s not very satisfying to throw something out into the world without refining it.

I want to read more.

I guess I have limited mental energy in a day, and both reading and writing takes up that energy. I wish it didn’t, I wish I could be someone who is as comfortable with a book as I am with mindless TV or games, but… I’m not. There are a whole bunch of short stories on Substack that I want to get around to reading, as well as the billion novels on my to-read list. Since I started this project, the only time I did a fair amount of reading was while I was on holiday.

I want to actually engage with other writers more as well and get out of my own head a little.

Have I achieved what I set out to do?

Somewhat.

Obviously I’m not going to be writing 100 stories in 100 days as originally planned, but does that mean I’ve failed?

Instead of the literal metrics I want to look at the broader purpose I mentioned in Can I write 100 stories in 100 days?

• I’ve proven to myself that I’m capable of writing regularly.

• I have written over 46,000 words, and I have played around a little with genre and style, as previously mentioned - all of this has added to my unquantifiable writing skills. God, I wish it was quantifiable though. I’d love to just stick a number on it and say “I am level 16 in writing, level 3 in juggling, level 0 in leaving the house.” Even the stories I wrote that I hate have at least helped me realise what I hate.

• Has it helped combat my perfectionism? I’ve temporarily swung the other way by putting up stories that fall way short of what I think I could do with an idea, but I don’t know yet how it’s affected me long term.

• It’s made me feel good about myself! Even if its not 100 stories (yet) it’s nice to look back on the stories and think: I did this! Me! Yay!

• I’ve shared my stories with strangers and I haven’t been cast into the pits of hell for arrogance or whatever other unnameable fears I have that make sharing things difficult.

The Future

Right now I’m planning to write 100 stories in a year instead, which leaves me with 63 stories left to write. There’s every chance I will procrastinate to write those as well!

I will aim to publish two stories a week and to continue doing a Sunday post on things I’ve read and enjoyed. I might skip doing any more stories this week so I can chill and have a think about what I want.

I might still write flash fiction, but I’d like to write longer short stories (3000+ words) that I can get my teeth into. Somewhere down the line I’d like to take a stab at a novella or something interactive, but I’d need to mull over that more.

I’m supposed to write these posts with a sense of certainty and enthusiasm and positivity, aren’t I? Or else be vulnerable and honest, but in an elegant, relatable way. I don’t think I’ve hit either note.

How do you, dear reader, find the right balance when it comes to writing, or any other hobby? When something starts to feel like a chore what do you do? Are you now going to try to write 100 stories in 100 days so you can be a WINNER?

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Out of curiosity I thought I’d record this, as it’s only 100 words long.

Beneath my branches, the dead are buried. With each new corpse I send out my roots and pierce their skulls, absorbing their skills, their memories, their beliefs. Funeral rites are fulfilled under the shade I supply and colourful ribbons are tied to my limbs by the youngest of the locals. When they come of age, they will choose a leaf and press it to their heart. Each leaf is a body I have digested and formed anew. Thus ancestral memories are passed down to the young, ensuring the town will thrive. When they die, their descendants will continue the ritual.

Still thinking about changing the whole “100 stories in 100 days” thing, but since I had a story in mind I figured I’d put it up.

This is my third 100 word story, alongside #30: Crystalline Divinity and #32: Finnegan’s Arch. I suppose if I mostly stuck to doing 100 word stories then I could stick to my original plan, but I wouldn’t find it satisfying.

Recording my voice is interesting though. I felt compelled to turn the pitch down by 3% as my polite customer service voice is too high pitched for my liking. I also haven’t quite got rid of all the noise, so that’s something I’d have to fiddle with more (or get a better mic) if I tried this out again.

What are your thoughts on Ancestral Memories? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

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Leah was sixteen when she was first killed. Her sister, Kali, stabbed her with a flint knife after Leah stole her backgammon set. Kali dragged her body to the base of the little waterfall in their cave and there Leah lay, preserved for ten years, until she gasped for air once more.

It took her two years to hunt down Kali. She crept up behind her sister and choked her until she stopped struggling. She threw the corpse onto a horse-drawn cart and rode back to where they had lived. There she lay her sister beside the life-giving waterfall, then went out into the world until her sister rose a decade later.

No one told them they were immune to true death, but over the years they realised nothing could truly kill them. Sometimes they were killed by disease, or accident, or even suicide, but as long as the other found their body and returned them to the waterfall, they survived. With each death, their bond grew stronger. Their family had died before Leah’s first death, and any friends they made seemed to live and die in the blink of an eye. After a millennium, the names of their parents were washed away, their minds too full of new memories - new friends, new inventions, new lands. 

Killing each other became a game, the only thing worth living for. They played cat and mouse across continents, laying breadcrumbs for the other to find. Famine and war raged around them, empires rose and fell, and throughout it all they hunted one another. Flint knives became iron became muskets became handguns. 

They made many enemies over the centuries, and one of them discovered their secret. A young man called James watched their comings and goings for years. After he saw Leah lay her sister to rest by the waterfall, he bashed her head in and lay her to rest too. In the ten years before they next drew breath, he bought up the land.

Then the tourists came. The cave and waterfall were cordoned off, only accessible to those who paid up. The sisters became part of the attraction, treated as artefacts from a bygone era. Through experimentation on both the sisters and the waterfall, James had shortened their resurrection period to six months, and allowed visitors to kill them in exchange for a hefty donation.

I’ve been very tempted to switch to 100 stories in a year instead… Not sure I can actually sustain this.

What are your thoughts on The Waterfall Sisters? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. Couldn’t work out how to end this one, so I’ve left it fragmented. Too damn tired right now.

Over a month’s worth of stories now! So many of my recent ones have been flash fiction, which I have mixed feelings about, but I’m still incredibly pleased I’ve stuck to it.

My long piece for the week was #34: Devoured Possibilities, about a woman called Nadia who puts herself in danger by investigating occult activities at the behest of her manipulative friend. I only wrote it yesterday so I haven’t yet figured out what I actually think about it. Go read it and tell me what to think!

Excess Reality

#34 of 100: Devoured Possibilities

Nadia peeled back a small crusty scab on her thumb as she sat on the mossy log where she and Sam were due to meet. She could never resist picking at scabs, despite knowing there was a risk it would lead to infection. Not that she got into scrapes often. She had been a bookish child who was always the last to be picked for any …

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3 years ago · 1 like · V L Augustin

Other stories this week:

#29: My Father, The Criminal - a flash non fiction piece about my dad going to prison.

#30: Crystalline Divinity - a 100 word story.

#31: Animals of the Arena - flash fiction. After every fight, Hadriana dragged the animal carcasses out and shovelled the most bloodied sand into a wheelbarrow.

#32: Finnegan’s Arch - another 100 word story.

#33: Pride Before a Fall - I hate it. That’s my blurb.

#35: The Reconfigured - flash fiction. Lars’s crimes were etched across his body.

Weekly Friction

This week’s angst: by continually leaving my writing to the last minute I never find myself having time to relax. I spend my day thinking “I should be writing”, finally start to scribble something down at 10pm, post it just before midnight, and then it turns midnight and the process of procrastination starts again. When I watch TV or chat with my housemates in the afternoon or early evening a large part of me is being slowly drained because I still have that thing to do.

I’m so used to procrastinating about everything (except my paid work somehow - I just get that done, and yet I can’t pull that “just do it” energy into my personal life!) that it’s hard to reconfigure my life around this new habit. I also think part of me keeps thinking: surely in an hour or two I’ll come up with a fresh idea and suddenly feel motivated to write.

I’ve mostly been coming up with ideas on the fly. Perhaps each evening I could try to think about what I want to write the next day. Hopefully I would feel more capable of writing the next afternoon as I already have a rough plan. Then, besides coming up with an idea, I can properly relax in the evening.

Maybe it would also mean I stop writing such short flash fiction… I don’t necessarily mind the end result of a story that is <1000 words, but it generally isn’t a satisfying writing experience for me.

Interesting Reads

I didn’t end up reading many short stories this week, though I’ve saved about ten that I want to read.

• The Fabulous Cat - I always appreciate when I read something with an unusual style, and the story itself is a delight too.

• Narcissism and Validity and Beyond Arrogance and Self Doubt - As someone who gets far too lost in my own thoughts and everything else about me, myself, and I, I found these to be really interesting articles. I particularly liked “Self-doubt isn’t the opposite of arrogance. It’s its tennis partner.” I also appreciate discussions about the shades of non-clinical narcissism, rather than just a black and white normal vs Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

• Never Break the Spell The Story is Weaving - I always appreciate precise writing advice, rather than the billion generic articles about writing that basically say “Have you considered having a plot?” This article focuses on language itself, rather than the over-arching aspects of stories.

• The Language-Ecology Connection - How linguistic diversity and building a sustainable future are more closely linked than you might expect. Interesting! A topic I never would have thought about before.

Thoughts on this week’s writing

#29: My Father, The Criminal

• I quite like this on the basis that I was trying to do something different (for me), and I value stories that are different quite highly, even if I'm not sure about the quality. Because it's not fiction its a little harder for me to actually judge the quality of this. I enjoyed thinking more about sentence flow and alliteration.

• I am uncomfortable with writing non-fiction, especially when it has some shades of vulnerability. Vulnerability seems fashionable these days, but it feels a little like I'm exploiting myself.

• Related, writing non fiction dips into my angst about authenticity. I remember being ushered away from the newspapers in the supermarket, but do I know that I was demanding answers, or offered chocolate to comfort me? Seems plausible, but not a sure thing. There's also something unpleasant about pinning down a single narrative, and the choice of what to highlight and what to avoid… Not a concern for the reader I suppose, but certainly a concern for me as the writer.

• In terms of writing, I'm not sure each paragraph flows well into the next. It jumps between internal thought and external action (visitation) without a clear sense of time.

• It also ends abruptly. I think it might be fine with just one more sentence to round it off, but I'm not sure what. I was tempted to go a little meta and say something about how the whole narrative could be used to spice up a writing exercise, but I couldn't work out how to phrase it.

#30: Crystalline Divinity

• I was trying to have a different rhythm to the sentence here, but I don't think it works - it needs some shorter/longer sentences.

• For a hundred word story I think it's fine - it functions as a story, it has a beginning and end. I always like the idea of divine fluids or body parts being cast down to earth. Its pleasantly strange that the combination of tears forms a new god. It still bothers me that I'm not sure if it should be "Crystalline Divinity" or "Crystallised Divinity".

• Rita doesn't feel integrated into the story. It might as well have been that a whole bunch of people collected the tears, or else that Rita had a hand somehow in the fusion of tears, thus warranting the mention of her.

#31: Animals of the Arena

• For something I came up with on the spot, I'm pretty pleased with this. I didn't know where it was going when I started, but it ended up feeling cohesive.

• The title is boring. Someone suggested "Paid in Blood", which I think is more evocative. Another person suggested "Crocodiles" - along with them being present in the story they also "lurk by looking like not-a-crocodile". I also just really like one word stories - even though that doesn't come across with my titling on this Substack!

• The prose feels a little clunky in places. I'm not keen on "would have made it easy to find a job" or "they hadn’t thought to consider that fights between gladiators and animals could be swayed".

#32: Finnegan’s Arch

• I like the idea of a hundred word story about the history of a monument, but hell if I know how to fit it into such a small word count.

• As my friend A E Deakin pointed out, "after more important wars had been won and lost" feels summaryish. I can’t work out how to succinctly put across what I want to.

• I don't like the clunky "could be found in a museum in the land of the barbarians". Also, the end phrase "its true history mangled" - I'm not sure it quite aligns with the rest of the story.

#33: Pride before a Fall

• I hate it. No further comment.

#34: Devoured Possibilities

• I almost always end up liking my longer short stories more, because there I can flesh out a character and a world and its usually an idea that I've thought about a little more than the ones I toss off at 11pm. So this has plenty of things I like: Sam and Nadia's relationship, the general idea about possibilities, the ridiculousness of snorting from an amputated thumb... It's a story I'm interested in going back to and exploring more, but I haven’t yet worked out if what I’ve written counts as “good” or not.

• The prose gets mechanical and clunky in the second half once Nadia is in the basement. I really struggled with working out how to deal with two female characters in the basement scene as well - so much "the woman", "the stranger", "her captor" to avoid unclear "she"s. I never quite know how to work around this, or whether most of the time I could have just used she and it would still be clear who I was referring to.

• Also, I think Nadia's personality becomes a bit blank slate by the time she's in the basement. There isn't much internal sense, e.g. thoughts about the other captives.

• I'm not sure if some of my early exposition disrupts the flow, particularly when specifying what the Henge event was.

• I have a few plot quibbles: Who supplied Sam with the information in the first place? Why was it so easy for Nadia to escape? Does having hypnotic eyes really fit into the whole possibilities angle? Is it plausible the woman hadn’t noticed the hidden microphone? Is it plausible Nadia could have escaped the restraints due to the loss of her thumb? Why didn't Nadia at least mention the other captives to Sam, so they could be rescued? (even if Sam argues that they need the proof of Nadia's testimony or something). Sam arriving is pretty rushed as well. I also need to read up on amputation.

• I need a more solid understanding of the worldbuilding. It's not really clear how the world has been effected by the Henge Event, and its not clear how frequently exploitation of possibilities happens, or who else investigates it - it seems mightily convenient that the police don't do much. If I knew more then I think just a few tweaks here and there could make the plot come together better.

• I'm not sure if I'm trying to draw some comparison or make some clever point about the unpleasant dynamics between Sam and Nadia vs the exploitation of her body (and others) by her captor? If I could work out what I was trying to say (if anything) maybe I could make the story feel a little more cohesive.

#35: The Reconfigured

• Another story about horrific body modification, but… I don’t think I really make it feel all that horrific. The narrative style is too removed.

• I don’t like the word “etched” in the first sentence, as the grafted pickaxe isn’t really something that is “etched”, but I also don’t want the first sentence to be explicit. I’m also not actually sure having a pickaxe instead of a hand would actually be useful for a miner…

• The end feels a bit too didactic. Abrupt as well. Like the end of this post!

Lars’s crimes were etched across his body. 

The punishment for burglary was five years of hard labour, but over the years the powers that be realised there were certain inefficiencies in how the dark, dangerous mines were operated. The criminals sent there quickly grew weak, their output slowing despite being flogged and subjected to other practices that ought to have been persuasive. Many died, and while the state did not mourn individual losses, the deaths held back the building of ships and the new-fangled trains that would ensure the country continued to prosper.

The greatest minds were called in to solve the problem. The solution, one inventor proclaimed, was not to modify the conditions, but to modify the criminals. Those that were too big needed to be reconfigured to be small. Those that had respiratory problems needed their throats adapted to filter out noxious gases. Those that struggled to swing a pickaxe needed one grafted to their wrist in place of their hand.

Lars had tried to melt down his pickaxe head by himself, but the burning sensation was no different to thrusting his flesh hand into the forge, and the agony made him recoil instinctively. He sought out the most nefarious doctors in the city, but they lacked the knowledge to operate. He even petitioned the state to reverse the changes inflicted on him, but his countless letters were ignored.

It wasn’t the stares on the street that bothered him, but that no respectable person would hire him. It didn’t matter that he knew how to read and write, or that he had had plenty of legitimate jobs before. Employers took one look at him and shook his head. Some thought they were being kind when they explained that of course they would hire him, but their boss wouldn’t like it, or the other workers wouldn’t like it, or they worried the state would pay too much attention to their business.

The only option still open to him was to join The Reconfigured, a hundred strong gang that solely recruited people who had been warped by the state. One woman had an unwieldy saw for an arm, an old man had an oven for a belly, a young boy had been stretched to be eight feet tall. The group had formed a camp in the forests and raided caravans to survive. Lars’s original burglary had been a foolish choice born of desperation, but theft soon became a way of life. 

Doesn’t have a proper ending, but I’d prefer to write something fragmented in the afternoon than have a last minute panic at night. I don’t like the word “etched” in the first sentence, but I can’t think of the right word.

What are your thoughts on The Reconfigured? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. What direction should the story take?

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Nadia peeled back a small crusty scab on her thumb as she sat on the mossy log where she and Sam were due to meet. She could never resist picking at scabs, despite knowing there was a risk it would lead to infection. Not that she got into scrapes often. She had been a bookish child who was always the last to be picked for any sports team, and her mother, ever the worry-wart, had never let her go on outings without supervision.

On this occasion, the injury was from leaping out of a first-floor window at the aptly named Caligula Club, which she had infiltrated on Sam’s instructions. She had been more worried about damaging the recording equipment she had brought with her, but Sam had later waved away such concerns. 

Sneaking into restricted places was a habit she had only recently picked up. A few months before, Sam had suggested (and Nadia had eagerly agreed) that they start up a project to expose those who had exploited the Henge Event.

Sam was late, as usual. Even though this part of the woods was deserted, Nadia felt too conspicuous, as if at any moment a whole crowd of people would spot her sitting alone and know what she was doing there. She tried to clear her mind and focus on the rustling of the leaves and the dappled light on the dirt path, but she had never been one for meditation, or for nature, for that matter. 

The crunch of leaves behind her made her jolt, but her nerves settled once she saw it was Sam, lugging a hefty backpack. When they were at uni together a few years before, Nadia had watched others orbit around her and had initially dismissed her as some rich idiot. Then, slowly, a friendship blossomed out of a joint fondness for literature, documentaries and medical shows. 

“Sorry. Got accosted by some guy on the way here,” Sam said, running a hand through her long hair. Nadia shuffled up to give Sam space to sit down on the dry section of the fallen tree. Sam bent down and peered at the woodlice that trickled out of a hole at one end of the log, then perched beside Nadia, their legs touching.

“No worries, I wasn’t waiting long. What happened, are you alright?” Nadia asked.

“Oh, yeah, just some harmless eccentric. Went on about how much he liked our site, how we were fighting the good fight, all that jazz. Just a bit hard to shake off, you know. Not like some of the people I’ve had to face recently… I mean, you’ve seen the messages.”

Sam had once shown her all the death threats she had received for daring to go on camera and talk about criminals manipulating innocent people as part of their perverse bargains with Hengers. Sam often spoke about the threats with a touch of glee - we must be doing good work if we have people this riled up!

“Right, so, I got a tip off about a building. It’s all in here.” Sam said, tapping the backpack. “I think it's a country manor, on the outskirts of Bristol, near some village called Stanton Drew. Apparently, a van full of people dropped them off there and they were never seen again. No police reports. Supposedly it's young homeless people and a few wayward teenagers, so no one is all that fussed.”

“Shouldn’t we report it to the police, then? They can search the place.” Nadia suggested.

Sam gave an exaggerated sigh, then knocked her shoulder against Nadia’s.

“Come on, Nadia. If you want justice done, you don’t go to the police. At best, we’re accused of wasting police time. At worst, the police will be in on it and God knows what would happen then. Besides, I can’t be sure anything is there. Could be hearsay. I’m just saying: go there and poke around a bit. I’ve put some equipment in the bag, and some petty cash for travel and snacks.”

Sam had been the one to start the whole cloak and daggers routine, but the paranoia had latched itself onto Nadia too. They never spoke about the Project over text or email, unless it was to arrange to meet up. Sam had even warned her against using her bank card when she got close to anywhere she was investigating, claiming the authorities or hackers might track her down.

“You’ve been amazing, you know that?” Sam continued. “The number of hits we got after I posted the article about the Caligula Club was insane! I even mentioned that my ‘investigative journalist’ had to jump out of a window when those creeps got suspicious. Everyone loved that detail.”

“Yeah. It was kinda harrowing.”

Nadia could still remember the smell of burning flesh and the empty eye sockets of the three teenagers that had been held there. No doubt similar horrors happened before the Henge Event, but now such mutilation served a greater purpose than mere sadism. Although everyone was masked at the club, someone had decided she didn’t belong there. They had called out and grabbed her arm and, driven by nothing but pure panic, she had flung open a window and leapt out.

Some nights the memories overwhelmed her. She’d call the Samaritans, but when they answered, she couldn’t find the words. She wasn’t even sure anyone would believe her.

“You can always talk to me, you know? Well, not over text obviously, but if you want to meet up more, just say the word. I’ve got a few interviews lined up this week, but I’m sure I could find time.”

Nadia shook her head. Sam put an arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. Nadia found herself burying her head against Sam’s neck. The scent of her perfume overrode the memory of other smells. Nadia’s body shuddered as she tried to hold back tears.

“You have been so brave, Nadia.” Sam whispered, stroking her hair. “Think of all the good you’ve done - you’ve helped put awful people behind bars, you’ve let the world know what’s happening. Even politicians are talking about our website. And I’ve protected you all the way through. Think of all the good there is still left to do, all the twisted crap that still needs to be exposed.”

Once Nadia realised snot was trickling down her face, she jerked backwards and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She was so undignified, she thought. Self-centred, too, to weep and waver over what she was doing. People were suffering, and if the police were going to continue to dismiss everything as hysteria then she needed to step up.

Sam’s phone buzzed. She took it out and scrolled through something, chuckling to herself.

“You good? You good.” Sam stood up and stretched her legs. “I figure Saturday might be a good time to poke around Stanton Drew. The earlier the better. Don’t forget to turn the camera on the second you approach the building.”

---

Back at her studio flat, Nadia rifled through the backpack. Along with some equipment and a USB flash drive, there was a folder filled with drone photos of a van entering the manor driveway. In the side pocket, she found a box of chocolates and some designer sunglasses. She grinned. She didn’t care for designer accessories, but she appreciated the gesture.

She made a hot water bottle and settled into bed before plugging the USB drive into her laptop. There was scant information on it. Aside from electronic duplicates of the photos and some records about the area, there were just a few notes about the people who were supposedly missing. Almost all of them were teenagers. A word document held a few bullet points, most of which were about paranoid conspiracies and barely comprehensible, but the part that caught her eyes was underlined:

Preparing for a second Henge Event???

Nadia lay back and breathed deeply, trying to release the dread that was seeping into her.

What had happened at Stonehenge six months earlier was a hotly debated topic. Some said that absolutely nothing had happened, that the record-breaking earthquake was a natural, albeit unusual, phenomenon. Those who proclaimed that something unnatural did happen largely hewed to the belief that an ancient scroll that had been recently found in the Hypogeum in Malta had been read out loud in the centre of Stonehenge by a man called James Kilgallon, a rich oddball and amateur historian. 

His companions, along with some tourists who had been present, claimed he had disappeared, replaced by a James Kilgallon shaped anomaly - a section of air that looked a little too pale, a little too painted. From that anomaly, dark things oozed out. The ancient stones rose off the ground, quivered, then toppled down, sending a shockwave through the surrounding areas. The police had Stonehenge in lockdown after that and placed security around other stone circles as well. 

Then there were rumours that what had come from the anomaly were beings that were adept at changing the flow of an entire world. Beings who could be talked to, bargained with, offered up sacrifices, in order to pucker up the fabric of reality and provide desirable outcomes for whatever the bargainer desired - love, wealth, obedience, power. The anomaly had been closed somehow by one of Kilgallon’s companions, so only a few such beings had seeped through, but it was enough to set the world on edge, the UK in particular.

Yet, in a sense, nothing had changed. People talked and talked, sharing theories about the past and the future, but little action was taken. The police were sluggish in responding to any reports about “Hengers”, as the beings were called, claiming that they were inundated with hoax calls and paranoid ramblings. Politicians said there was nothing to worry about. Scientists said they had to gather more data. An event that everyone knew was a turning point for humanity slipped so easily into the hundred other apparent turning points for humanity that had occurred in the last decade.

Nadia couldn’t let that happen, not once she had heard about the people being hurt by esoteric rituals around the UK. It was always teenagers that were exploited. While infiltrating the Caligula Club, she had overheard a man claim that the flesh of teenagers was most sought after by the Hengers, as it was an age full of possibilities that could be devoured and regurgitated into possibilities for others. She felt compelled to prevent any more vulnerable teenagers from suffering.

The activity around the country manor was probably perfectly innocent, she told herself. Some overly suspicious neighbour had undoubtedly worked themselves up over nothing. Once she had proven there was nothing odd going on, she could spend a pleasant afternoon wandering the streets of the village and perhaps even take a peek at the nearby stone circle from behind the safety cordon. 

---

Nadia’s alarm buzzed at an ungodly hour of the morning that Saturday. She made her way to Bristol by train, then had a long ride in a stuffy, sweltering bus, and arrived in Stanton Drew in the early afternoon. 

The lanes were narrow and lacked pavements. In London she could swan around without anyone batting an eyelid, but here she felt conspicuous, especially as a pedestrian. Every time a car passed, she wondered if “they” were in on “it”, then shook her head as if the paranoia could be shaken off like dead leaves from a tree. 

She kept a hand on her phone in her pocket, ready to call Sam if anything felt wrong. Only as a last resort would she ring the police. As Sam always reminded her, they weren’t on their side. Their lacklustre response to anything involving Hengers suggested they were being held back from investigating. Perhaps more importantly, Nadia suspected Sam would excommunicate her if she dared speak to them. 

A large wrought-iron gate with a security chain looped around it barred her way to the manor, and a low wall and a tall hedgerow stretched either side of the gate. The driveway curved round from there, the bushes obscuring her view of the manor. Having scouted the area on Google maps, she had expected this. She wandered further down the road until there was a more sparse section of bushes. 

A car drove past as she stood staring at the gap. Her heartbeat quickened, and she strolled on until the car was out of sight, then scurried back to the gap. She took a deep breath in and focused her attention on the surrounding sounds. No more cars. No sounds coming from beyond the hedge. No personal drones buzzing up above. She was alone. Unseen.

She put on her leather gloves and crawled through the mass of stems, instantly realising it was not as traversable as it looked. Her clothing snagged on the branches, and something scratched her sunglasses. Some buzzing insect hovered right by her ear and she clamped her mouth closed, afraid it might decide to crawl in her mouth.

Nadia got through to the garden on the other side, her pride diminished. She was an amateur, she thought, utterly unsuited to the work she now found herself doing. What had Sam seen in her that made her think they could be partners on such a complex project? She remembered how Sam had spoken about her potential, and Nadia had just laughed nervously. She had tried so hard to be kind to others and aware of injustice, but the most action she had taken before this was going on protests and helping out at a homeless shelter.

She got to her feet and brushed the dirt from her gloves. The manor stood at the end of the winding driveway, austere and dilapidated. The garden itself was unkempt, weeds littered among the tall grass. A large grey van stood in the driveway, the same one in the photographs Sam had given her. Besides that, she could have mistaken the place a holiday home for someone who hadn’t visited in a while. She pulled an owl necklace out of her bag and clipped it around her neck. It was the same spy necklace she had used at the Caligula Club, still intact from her fall.

Not wanting to be out in the open for too long, Nadia quickly strode to the side of the building. Curtains obscured the insides of every room, and all the windows were closed. Keeping close to the wall, she moved around to the back of the building to discover a wide veranda, with several wicker chairs and tables laid out.

Sat one of the chairs, holding a cup of tea, was a stylish old woman staring straight at her. A smile spread across the woman’s face.

Nadia bolted.

“I don’t bite!” the woman called out in a clipped accent, but Nadia didn’t turn back. 

She sprinted round the manor and down the driveway without thinking. She only remembered it was locked when she rattled it and tried to force it open. The woman was striding across the lawn towards her, so she ran along the hedgerow, trying to find the gap she had crawled through. All the shrubs looked the same from this side.

“It’s alright, really, I’m not going to call the police on you.” The woman said, now only metres away.

Nadia gulped, then turned to face her. She didn’t believe her, but she hoped she could at least talk her way out of trouble. Sam would enjoy the story, she thought.

“I’m so sorry, I thought this place was abandoned,” Nadia said, trying to match the woman’s posh accent. It was a skill she had picked up at university, but somewhat more difficult to do when she was out of breath. “It was just a bit of a lark.”

“Of course. Humans are driven by curiosity. The modern world seeks to smother such things and put everyone in neat little boxes, don’t you think?”

Their eyes met, and Nadia relaxed. Such beautiful blue eyes couldn’t belong to someone who meant to do her harm. And her voice - so mellifluous and calm. The tension throughout Nadia’s body eased.

“How old are you?” The woman asked. 

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four! Still so young. Why not come in for some fruit cake? I made some just this morning.”

Nadia followed her, a loose, airy feeling in her limbs, as if gravity had suddenly weakened. The woman had the bearing of an old actress, she decided, every movement and gesture graceful. Nadia had come here to do more than eat fruitcake, but at that moment she couldn’t quite remember what.

The interior was more spacious than she had expected, with tall ceilings and huge mirrors on the wall. The curtains were still shut tight, but the woman flicked a switch and the room was flooded with light. Nadia took a place at the rough kitchen table, though she could see an ornate dining table in the room beyond.

“Here you go,” the woman said, placing a plate of fruitcake in front of her. “You must be quite brave to go exploring abandoned buildings. What led you to this one?”

Nadia dug a fork in the slice of fruitcake, then paused. The woman had said she had just made it, but it felt stale, and looked store-bought. Why did she offer it to her, anyway? Nadia thought. Nothing felt quite right. She needed to call Sam. She stared at her plate, trying to piece together the last few minutes.

The woman grabbed Nadia’s chin and turned it towards her. Nadia saw a flash of the pale blue eyes then squeezed her eyes shut.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. She leapt to her feet, squinting her eyes so she could only see the bare outline of the room, then stumbled towards the kitchen door. The old woman grabbed her from behind and flung her to the floor with unnatural strength. The stranger pinned down one of her arms - Nadia tried to push her away with her free hand, but her attacker pressed her knee down on her wrist and Nadia squealed in pain.

“Open your eyes for me, can you do that for me?” The woman said, still with a beautifully melodic voice, despite being breathless from the struggle.

With her free hand, the woman placed her thumb and forefinger on Nadia’s left eye, trying to prise it open. Nadia tried to bite her hand, the old woman slapped her, then Nadia opened her eyes in shock.

Their eyes met. Nadia drowned in the woman’s gaze.

---

Harsh light shone through Nadia’s eyelids. She groaned and tried to curl up, then felt the restraints on her wrists and ankles holding her down.

“Nadia, Nadia, Nadia.” The woman whispered, somewhere to the side. “It’s safe to open your eyes. It won’t change your situation now.”

Nadia felt the stranger’s hand touch her forehead to brush her hair to the side. She flinched. Then, eager to rip the band-aid of uncertainty off, she opened her eyes.

She was strapped to a medical trolley bed. She wore nothing but her underwear and a loose gown. On a table beside her sat her cut up clothes. Unwearable. Her spy necklace was also there, smashed. There was a chance Sam had looked at the uploaded footage already, Nadia thought, there was a chance the police were already on their way. The camera would have caught the woman’s face. What she had done wouldn’t be in vain.

Lifting her head, she saw she wasn’t the only one in the room. Nine other trolley beds were lined up in the cold, windowless basement, each with a young person stretched out on it.

None of the bodies were quite right. The teenage girl next to her had her jaw twisted ninety degrees round, and three amputated fingers on the arm she could see. The boy diagonal from her had a plate-sized hole where his belly should have been, although she could see his chest rise and fall with each breath. She felt nauseous. The clinical setting rendered everything worse, proving the mutilator had worked with premeditation and precision. 

“Are these the people you were hoping to save, Nadia?” The woman said softly. She now wore medical scrubs, and gestured with a gloved hand to the other beds. “Beautiful young things in the prime of their life, so many doors of possibilities open to them.”

“You know my name,” Nadia croaked. 

Her captor held a cup of water to her lips, and although Nadia wanted to show defiance, she found herself drinking up gratefully. The woman then waved Nadia’s phone in her face. Nadia gave an empty laugh. She always used fingerprint security, never thinking of how it might backfire.

“Friends with Sam Petersen. You’re the same young woman seen lurking about the Caligula Club, I bet. Hm?”

Nadia sighed and closed her eyes. Dread crawled over her, as physical as if she had been buried with a hundred insects. She breathed in the smell of cleaning products. It was so unlike the dark, smoky corners of the Caligula Club, and yet the end result was the same.

“Why? Why is this…?” Nadia trailed off.

“Your body keeps a score of all possible threads of the future. The ‘Hengers’, as people call them, know how to bottle fate. Who wouldn’t want that? Each bargain we make with them brings us a little closer to understanding the universe.”

“Your eyes…”

“A gift. Fleeting. It sapped the possibilities I’ve absorbed, requiring me to perform more inflictions.”

Nadia shivered. Her clothing was too thin to provide any warmth, and the possible “inflictions” she could face multiplied in her mind. Sam was the only one who even knew she was here. None of her other friends or family knew what she had been investigating. The inevitability of what would happen next overwhelmed her.

The woman clicked her tongue, rose from her stool and moved to another room, closing the door behind her.

“Hello?” Nadia called out to the other victims in the room. 

From her position she could only really see two. The teenage girl with the unnatural jaw turned towards her, frowning in anguish. She opened her mouth, but all that came out was a soft gurgle.

From the other room she heard the woman speak a harsh, unfamiliar language. For a moment, the lights in the basement seemed to blaze even brighter. Something was there, in the other room. She couldn’t see, hear or smell it, but some unnameable sense felt it tugging at her. Her breath caught in her throat as she struggled against an unfamiliar, almost spiritual, pain.

The woman came back into the room alone, but the sensation didn’t subside.

“You’ll have to excuse my poor bedside manner,” the woman said, though Nadia struggled to hear her through the pain. “I found reassurances didn’t help one jot with my other guests here. And I can’t use anaesthetic, I’m afraid. It disrupts the full potential of the infliction.”

She dragged a metal trolley ladened with surgical equipment from the corner of the room. Scalpels and forceps and tools unfamiliar to Nadia gleamed in the light. She twisted her head to the other side and squeezed her eyes shut.

She felt something being tied around her left thumb, tight enough her thumb grew numb. Her spiritual pain now seemed to flow there. It felt as if the pain was in another thumb, mirrored in another dimension, overlapping with the one she knew and had used every day of her life. 

Then came the physical pain. Agony. Nadia screamed out despite herself and heard groans from the other victims as they echoed her pain. It hurt worse than anything she had experienced, the twin pains intermingling into something that felt like it cut to the core of who she was. Something was being cut off from her, and she, too, was cut off from it. Her whole body shook.

The woman stepped away, and Nadia felt compelled to look at her. There, in the stranger’s gloved hand, sat Nadia’s thumb. She held it bloodied end up and Nadia sobbed as she watched black vapour rise from it. The woman pressed the thumb against her nose and snorted the vapour. The whites of her eyes turned black.

“Possibilities!” She cried out in joy.

Blood pumped out of Nadia’s thumb hole and dripped onto her restraints. She felt faint, but still she kept her eyes on the woman and tried to stay awake. After a few minutes, the woman threw the thumb on the table and returned to the other room once more.

Nadia stared at her discoloured, bloodied thumb. No coherent thoughts went through her mind, just thumb, thumb, thumb, as regular as the pulsing pain she felt. 

Slowly, some sense came back to her, and something in her mind clicked into place. The stranger may have taken many possibilities from her, but she had opened up a possibility too.

Nadia tried to wrench her mutilated hand out of her restraints. She gritted her teeth as she pushed through the agonising pain. Finally, she wriggled free. She ripped off the restraint around her other wrist, then off her ankle restraints, too.

The woman on the bed next to her gurgled, her eyes open wide in shock.

“I will come back, I will send someone back, I promise!” Nadia whispered.

She swept everything on the side table into her bag that rested on the floor - phone, clothes, broken necklace. It seemed an impossibly loud noise, but the woman didn’t re-enter. She grabbed her cold thumb, slipped on her shoes, then darted across the basement, cradling her left arm against her chest.

There were two doors leading out. Nadia opened the one the woman hadn’t gone through. Dark stone stairs twisted upwards. She stumbled up the stairs, half her weight leaning on the stone wall as dizziness threatened to topple her. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked. She pulled it open and tottered into the dining room.

For a second she was overwhelmed by how ordinary everything suddenly looked - an expensive furniture set dominated the room and fine china sat in the cabinets, while down below young people were being mutilated. She quickly wrapped a torn strip of her shirt around her thumb, then pushed on.

She fled the house and scrambled through the hedgerow, barely acknowledging the scratches the branches gave her. All the pain was concentrated in her thumb, which was still pumping blood and she had no real way to stop it without putting herself in danger. Once out on the road, she pulled her phone out. 

Calling the police was the obvious choice, she thought. Yet the woman’s self-assurance had unnerved her. Surely nobody would feel that entitled to inflict horrors unless they had some reassurance that they wouldn’t be discovered. It seemed likely that whoever had passed on information to Sam had tried going through official channels and failed.

As she held the phone in her hand, it began to ring. Sam.

“Oh god, Sam, I don’t know what to -”

“I’m on my way already. I’m, like, ten minutes away. Are you okay? You’re free?”

“How did you… Did you see the footage?”

“Yeah, until the camera was smashed. You left the mic in your bag, so I could hear some of what happened. Just… Just run now, ok? Run to The Druid Arms, I’ll pick you up from there. I’ll get you to a hospital. Don’t hang up.”

Nadia shuffled down the lane with the phone clutched in her intact hand, her body kept upright by nothing but adrenaline. Her gown was pasted to her body by the cold sweat that drenched her. A car passed by and beeped at her. The driver yelled some obscenity, then drove off. Nadia didn’t have the energy to even process what was happening.

“Nadia!”

Sam’s car pulled up to her just before she reached the pub. Sam opened the passenger door and Nadia collapsed into the seat beside her.

“You’re safe. You’re safe.” Sam said, rubbing Nadia’s shoulder. She placed her phone between them and opened up a voice recording app.

“I’ll drive you to a hospital, I’m driving you there right now. Don’t pass out on me. I just… I just don’t want the doctors to get their hands on you and then muddle up your memories, okay? Okay, Nadia? While I’m driving, tell me everything that happened. Tell me everything. Our audience has to know.”

So…This is the first time I’ve posted my story after midnight. Hopefully won’t turn into a habit. I also wrote some of this on Wednesday and Friday - not technically against my main rule of writing a story a day, but against the general spirit of the thing.

I’m pleased with a lot of ideas here, and frankly I’m pleased to just sink my teeth into a longer story. I feel like this could be made much longer - it’s certainly something I’d be interested in taking another look at. I had thoughts about Nadia’s background that I didn’t get around to inserting.

As always with longer pieces, I feel the main let down is the prose - mechanical and clunky in some places, and a fair amount of repetition. I really struggled with the pronouns… I slightly regret making the captor female. There are also a few things that feel like plot holes - why was it so easy for Nadia to escape? Does having hypnotic eyes really fit into the whole possibilities angle? Is it plausible the woman hadn’t noticed the hidden microphone?

What are your thoughts on Devoured Possibilities? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.

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