Fic: Fairy Tale

“Will you play a game with me?”

He doesn’t look up: not even scantily-clad nymphs can distract the King of Hell from his quarterly reports. “You’re confusing me with Death. I only gamble.”

“Not chess, you silly. Poker, I was thinking, or blackjack. We could make the stakes interesting.” She walks her fingers up his shoulder.

“I prefer to gamble for souls. Why would I be interested in playing a game with you?”

She spins away from him, lifting her hair and flicking it back to draw the eye to the smooth line of her spine, exposed but for ivy and scraps of silk. Her head turns so that it is perfectly framed in the arch of her raised arm, and she lifts long lashes to meet his gaze. “I’ll let you name your own stakes.”

The Devil sets down his paperwork, precisely in the middle of the blotter. He sets his paperweight on the upper left corner, and its empty sockets leer at her exactly the way he is too controlled to. “What do you want?”

“I want the chance to win your powers for a night.”

“Which powers?”

She flits back to his desk and leans over the front of it, giving him a clear view down the front of a dress that never hid much. “All of them, silly. Why play for anything less?”

“If I win, Orphne, I want you for a month.” He says it low, trying for nonchalance. He is rarely denied, rarer still for very long, but nymphs cannot be coerced and are not easy prey for his brand of temptation.

Her grin is sharp, because she knows the power she holds. “Okay.” She produces a deck of cards from - somewhere, he doesn’t want to think where, and shuffles. “One hand, then, and aces are wild. Since it’s your realm, I’ll deal. That work for you?”

“Your terms are acceptable.” He smoothes one already-smooth lapel and gestures at the immaculate liquor cabinet behind him. “Can I pour you a drink?”

“Oh, this won’t last long.” She deals a card to him facedown, then one to herself, then him, then deals herself a face-up Queen of Hearts. She sets the deck aside and checks her facedown card, the looks up at him expectantly.

He looks at his cards, then says, “Hit me.”

She obliges with a five. The Devil smiles, and turns over his cards: the Ace of Spades, of course, and another five. “Twenty-one,” he says.

She flips her other card, and it is the Ace of Hearts. “Too bad.”

“Of course. Fetch the gold goblet, will you?”

“This? Really?” She holds up a battered cup with old dull carvings on it.

“I’m fond of wordplay. What better than real blood from the Sangreal?” He takes the cup and slices his left forefinger with his thumbnail. Blood rushes out, and then it stops when the cup is half full.

Orphne takes the cup and drains it in one go, her throat working around it. He watches her intently, particularly when she licks her lips after. Her dress fades from green to blood-dark and she smiles. "Well, things to do, places to be. Thanks for the game."

She’s gone in a flare of smoke and a whiff of brimstone. Lucifer puts his head down on his desk and wishes that light wouldn’t chase away the shadows of self-deceit.

**
The shortest night of the year holds a greater number of secrets than any but the longest. Festival frivolity lifts the veil between worlds and the veil between proper and improper, and all may pass freely back and forth with no thought to consequences come the dawn.

They all wear masks, but it’s easy to recognize many from familiar postures and voices. An unfamiliar woman in a black dress wends her way through the crowd to the officer in conspicuous uniform and unmasked face. “When do you go off-duty?”

“Midnight is shift change, ma’am.”

“I’ll meet you here at five after.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t say that he should find his wife at the end of his shift, but watches her as she walks away.

A cask of mead is unearthed in the beer tent, and, in a gesture of unanticipated magnanimity the local brewer gives glasses of it away. Beer sales drop, but that’s okay, as the cask of mead never seems to run dry.

The perfumed summer air grows thick with temptation.

A thin woman in well-tailored clothes goes back for a second hot dog, and a fifth. After the seventh, she vomits neatly and wipes her mouth with a well-practiced hand and goes back for an eighth.

Two brothers joyfully get into a fist-fight before they are carted off by police officers who tighten the cuffs just barely overtight.

The brewer is distracted from serving by counting the money-box.

In full knowledge of the fact that her husband is not here, a woman approaches her best friend's handsome husband, the one she wishes she'd married because he is so very wonderful.

The Mayor watches from his chair in the beer tent and can't bring himself to do more than drink more mead.

Orphne pulls a little harder on her new powers, puzzled that there are not more couples sanctifying the forest. She can see the cusp of wanting in them all, and tugs harder to pull them over.

Another fist fight breaks out, and there is a flash of subdued light beside her. “We're all tempted by different things, my darling little cheater.”

She sets her jaw. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

Lucifer slides one finger under the strap of her dress and glides it up her shoulder. “You are accustomed to a particular kind of wanting. But there are seven cardinal sins, not one, my pet. For example, it is the very definition of pride to think you can deceive the King of Hell with a simple glamour on a card to disguise a ten as an ace.”

She whirls to glare at him. “Why'd you even let me go through with it, then?”

He shrugs. “Why not? It does me no harm to let you try to preserve your forest. I thought we might even participate, given our deal and the fact that I'm here already.”

She takes his hand and leads him into the woods, anger radiating from every pore.

No matter how you rig the game, the Devil always gets his due.

Songfic, and other creatures from the zoo

Sometimes a song is particularly inspiring.

Like this one: I really like it. I have written portions of stories that were inspired by it, as I find lots of bass and a steady beat good for reminding me of an atmosphere of adventure, and 'I just want to turn the lights on in these volatile times' seems like really good motivation to go and do something really stupid.

Songs can be useful reminders of an atmosphere one is trying to evoke, particularly for those of us who have a tabbed browsing problem (currently open: Tumblr, blogger, two Youtube tabs, a wikipedia article, a knowyourmeme.com article, three writing projects, two stories I am supposed to be critiquing, a forum thread, and two stories I'd like to read). If I get drawn in to other things and disrupted from the mood I was writing, a song can remind me of what it was I was trying to do with the scene. Video game and movie soundtracks are integral to the mood of a piece, and the music Stephanie Meyer listened to while writing Twilight became a sort of soundtrack as well, so popular music relating to other media is not a new concept. Society is a story machine, and they leak out all over, and each tastes of the others.

But songs can take on other roles in stories, like the fanfiction My Immortal drawing its title, chapter titles, and tone primarily from Evanescence and My Chemical Romance songs. There also exists songfic, which involves weaving lyrics into plot.

One of the neatest approaches to songfic I've ever read was Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. It follows the plot of the Scottish ballad of the same name, and the full text of the ballad was included in the back of the book I read. The text itself is full of broad and witty references to literature, and a portion of its charm stems from the fact that it is in many ways a book about stories.

Meta: Purpose

This was written for the semi-final round of Adam's contest. This was the prompt:

Object Perspective
Your assignment for this round is to write a story or poem from the perspective of a kitchen sponge, broom, towel or fork. Yup, that's what I said. Have fun. 

I hated this prompt. I hated it so much. I don't particularly like writing anthropomorphism, and I've grown to dislike reading it, too. I read Silverwing and loved it and thought it was amazing, and I watched parts of the Redwall series as a kid. I read Animorphs and The Ship Who Sang and more werewolf stories than you can shake a stick at, so I was familiar with the more direct way of applying human characteristics to non-human things, too. But at some point I stopped liking it when human characteristics are applied to inhuman things. I like when the alien is alien and written as such. I like well-done xenobiology and earnest tries at xenopsychology and machine intelligences that are machine and uninterested in becoming human.

A lot of times, anthropomorphic objects are presented that way in children's literature. In children's literature, it can be a way to raise awareness of consideration for objects or the environment, or a way to present values in a way that is stripped of a lot of other societal constructs (the Little Engine That Could didn't have to deal with systemic oppression or privilege, just trying his hardest).

But part of all writing is writing to your audience, and Adam is the audience for this contest, and he is not a child. Writing it as a children's story wouldn't have worked, either for him as the audience or for me as a writer.

Honestly I think I spent nearly as much time complaining about this as writing it.

That is not to imply that it was rushed, but that I complained a lot and have several people I should apologize to.

What I hate most about the prompt is that I really like the story and have no real problems with it or areas I think definitely need improvement.

In a piece of irony, I put a silver plate in the dishwasher very late one night after working on this.

Fic: Purpose

I am reasonably certain they don’t know what I’m for.

This isn’t because they’re ignorant in general, but more likely because their parents - maybe grandparents, it’s been such a long time since I was out of the box - only used me when they were throwing me at their own parents and shouting about Birmingham. It took years for the stench of pot and politics to fade from the lining.

Then, I measured the passage of time in Christmases and Thanksgivings and Easters, when we’d all be taken out and put to use. I was sometimes horrifically employed on - of all things - pickles, but at least I got fresh air and scrubbing.

Now I measure the passage of time in Vinyl Cafe Christmas specials coming faintly from next door. The walls are thin, and the neighbour’s hearing is going, so I can hear Stuart McLean almost clearly.

The world is changing.

They bring out our case in the middle of summer for some kind of dinner party, and it’s almost like our first owners’ weekly formal dinner parties. But now they are puzzling over why the knives are different sizes, not able to tell which are dinner knives and which are butter knives. The spoons cringe, and the fish forks swear like sailors as they are deemed dessert forks.

I am passed over as “I don’t know, some kind of fish fork?”

I would that I could snarl at them. I have served judges and mafia kingpins and celebrities. Even men who died as petty criminals had more awareness of the way things worked.

The box closes with me still in it, and I am in the closet with a few serving spoons and the dessert forks while the dinner progresses. The serving spoons complain in their ponderous way until I threaten to scratch them.

Dubstep wubs through the apartment, shivering up through the box to rattle us. I liked it better when live jazz threaded through a room after dinner, when the marmoreal elegance of the lady of the house hadn’t been replaced by workman’s trousers. I must grudgingly concede that the CBC has improved their programming over the years, but that is the only thing, I think.

The sounds fade with time, and then the dishwasher starts.

The box opens, and there is light and air and the lingering smell of chicken. The knives are placed again amongst us. They are mottled faintly black and blue, an unhealthy shimmer all over them. Collective horrified silence greets them.

The box goes back in the closet, the damage they’ve wreaked hidden and ignored. Time passes.

The closet is emptied, contents sorted into piles to be packed, sold, donated, and trashed. A susurration of horror passes between us. We’ve been with the family for years and years, but these miscreants and wastrels - well, at least we end up in the pile to be sold. At least they recognize that we are worth something.

I am shaking in rage as we are loaded into their car. Three - or was it four? - unbroken generations of service, and we’re not even being offered to siblings. We are taken to a consignment store as if we were never of any importance at all.

A sticker is slapped on the exterior of the box, which has grown dry since the days it was oiled at least once a month. I wonder how we’ve been valued.

Not much, not near enough, since we are there for only a day. The car that takes us to our new home is quiet and well climate-controlled. We are put in a drawer, and I expect that to be the end of it.

Mere hours later, the box opens, and a man reaches in with hands that smell of silver polish. The spoons are immediately in love, but I withhold judgement. I doubt he’ll know what I’m for, either.

Then we’re back in the box and the drawer is closed.

There is no neighbour with CBC here, and thus no entertainment nor way to tell time. It doesn’t feel like long, though, before the box is opening again.

The butter knives are first out, and he doesn’t hesitate at all to pick them apart from the dinner knives. Then the soup spoons and salad forks and dinner forks. The fish forks are left in their partition, and I anticipate that I will be as well.

There are sounds of a table being set, and so it seems this will be the end of it, until the hands return. The snobby cheese knives with the mother-of-pearl handles are extracted, and then slim fingers return for me.

I anticipate some manner of indignity, like antipasto or relish. Bundled with those awful knives, we approach a kitchen island laid out with amuse-bouches, amongst them - [i]oh[/i]. He intends to put me to my true use. I will have purpose again. I do not care how long I will have to wait between uses, because here, here I am fully myself.

I sink into the dish of olives with a satisfied sigh.