Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
First Night Rain
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
I look down from my high window, forgetting the brush in my hand, because the night is that beautiful. The rain drifts like smoke. The round paper lanterns, not yet put out by the water, gambol in the wind, and the leaves pattern and re-pattern against the light.
We had lanterns just like these at my fifteenth birthday party. (Was it that long ago?—Now the servants hurry out to take them down in the swinging dark. This storm couldn’t put out a fire, should the roofs catch.) At my party, my father waited until the moon warned us it was rising. Then he lifted my sake cup out of my hand and said, “Now we must go, Kaida.”
We walked up the hill to our shrine. Two of our strongest bodyguards had to pry open the doors, for they had not been opened since my father was fifteen. The hinges squealed and growled.
We lit the lamps on the altar, and left incense sticks burning in the old drifts of ash. In the dim light I saw the clean, deep gashes in the wooden floor.
“You must blow out the lamps when I go,” he reminded me.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
So he left me. I blew out the lamps and waited in the dark, among the columns like trees.
By the time the moon was up I had no doubt—if I ever had—of my paternity.
I have to say, I was magnificent. My fingers and toes lengthened into perfect claws; my white skin burst into shining white scales; I coiled and uncoiled, sliding over myself, and when I roared, I brought rain to the fields: with my new dragon ears I could hear the clouds gathering in the night.
Tonight, I can hear the fields shouting greetings to the rain. After the moon rises behind the clouds I will shed my smaller form for a while, climbing up into the flying dark, coiling and uncoiling, telling our valley its name, and hearing it tell me mine.
Even though I’d spent my whole life knowing this might well be my inheritance, I still felt frightened that first night, waiting in the dark, wondering if the first telltale shimmer and strength would come. It takes time, to grow into the dragon woman one can be.
Exploded
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
Scott had been torn away in the middle of a kiss with his girlfriend, Lara, and he had been thrown about twenty feet off the ground, spread-eagled as though in mid-skydive. The pillar of light that had come down from the sky had smashed into the pavement with a warped rainbow of raw force that made the air shudder with its ferocity. Shattered glass from shop windows had been blown into the air in fragment clouds that shimmered in the brilliant glare of the blast, creating an illusion, for just that moment, that the whole world had stars in it, that everything could step free of the bonds of gravity, that everything was beautiful. This was the top of things, the most glorious thing Scott had ever experienced, with the thrill of the adrenaline already streaming into his blood and the hammer of cortisol not yet mauling his anxiety levels to the hysterical peak they would reach in the following ninety seconds.
Before he plummeted back down to crash into an upended Volkswagen; before his face was burned and permanently disfigured; before Scott’s panicked and painful flight from the rainbow-trailing attack ships that dropped down into the city like hungry pterosaurs, there was this perfect moment, this moment of wonder and beauty, completely mystifying to an unprepared human population.
In some ways, Scott thought, however horrible everything was that came after, didn’t that one startling moment make it all worthwhile?
No, it didn’t, he decided. Now, weeks later, he lined up the bug-like alien guard he’d been stalking in the targeting window of his stolen alien fusion rifle and fired.