flashfic
Chalice
Let’s sit down, you and I, and talk about the chalice. There’s only one for the two of us. And it’s empty, but it’s full of reflections.
From that chalice you can drink the moon and her entourage of stars, and their cloaks of black silk. From that chalice you can drink the sun sheathed in gunsmoke clouds, and the unstaunched light. From that chalice you can drink the ghosts of roses past.
Moon, Paper, Scissors
White shapes fell from Mei’s hands: here a narrow triangle, there a half-ripped crescent. A shadow cut across the pile of scraps on the floor. Mei stopped, her scissors gaping wide and bright. She kept looking at the blades.
The Third Song
It was midway in the morning of the world, in the great middle desert, and a woman knelt beneath a tree beneath the wide, wondering sky. Her eyes were wet, her throat was dry, her feet as rough as the sand.
Carousel Foals
The breeding of carousel horses is like and unlike the breeding of more ordinary steeds. Carousel horses have their bloodlines, their registries, their stud books. The breeders, who must demonstrate skill with bonsai and acrylics, Fallabellas and broad-backed destriers, select the dams for their kindly temperaments and strong backs. It is no small thing to bear the hopes of a child, and the breeders take their responsibility to produce suitable carousel horses very seriously.
Candles
When I hand you a candle, I don’t expect you to burn. I don’t expect your hands to glove black (ashes are my favorite fashion), and I don’t expect the smoke to be your perfume.
The Bridge
In a garden where all the swans are black and the flowers murmur the names of long-ago lovers, there is a bridge. It is wrought from alabaster and jasper and ageless gold, and if you look closely, you can see that the five sacred animals have been carved into each side.
Bookmarks
In a land beyond the last ocean, where the gulls wheel landward only to return with table scraps, there are great libraries in every city and town. The citizens of this land are fond of reading. They learn foreign languages to extend their pleasure, delighting in determinatives and boustrophedon, participles and particles.
The Birdsong Flute
Some speak of the forest’s great trees, fire-scarred and crowned with the nests of birds extinct elsewhere, and others speak of the tigers, who delight in giving terrible advice to travelers when they are hungry, but can always be trusted to be honest about go stratagems. The forest has known exiled poets and princesses, pious warriors and worried monks, and it writes their names in its loam just as it writes the secret lives of the squirrels and hedgehogs.
Balloons
In their far-ranging migrations, the nomads collect heat sources to keep their white-and-gold balloons aloft. Sometimes they scavenge shards of starfire, and at other times the radiance of first love. Their warriors harvest vendettas between families that worship at the altar of gun and sword. And their magicians charm pride from composers who write whickering suites for the horse-headed fiddle, or choirs famous for singing the fossils of extinct birds out of the earth.