Um

I wasn't really feeling any prompts today, so instead have the first little excerpt from my newest short story. I like how it's starting out.

He was late. She could not abide tardiness, she prided herself on her persistent punctuality, and he was late. To the first date. By all accounts she should have written him off right then, but there was something about those warm brown eyes, the charming half-smile, the silliness. She stayed despite herself.

She won him over with a song, sung loudly and off-key. Her red hair glinted gold and copper and blue and purple in the tacky lights on the karaoke stage. Her eyes shone with enthusiasm and alcohol and she crooned into the mic some meant-to-be sexy torch song that mostly just made her look adorable as she tried a little too hard. She was too cheerful to be appropriately jazzy for the song, her smile unable to hide itself long enough for sex appeal. He was instantly in love.

He won her over with humor. He was happy, and his happy bubbled over into a deep need to make everyone else happy too. He wanted nothing more than to make the world smile. And so he told bad dad jokes at every opportunity, played little games to make her laugh, danced with her in the kitchen and chased her with pillows and made her giggle until her sides hurt and she forgot that all the bad things in her life had ever happened. And the laughter healed something that had been broken a very long time. She was in love.

It's impossible to say exactly when they moved in together. One day he came over and just never left. And from that point their love was ripped from the pages of a fairy tale or a rom-com. She baked for him, brought him breakfast in picnic baskets to be eaten on the bench outside his work. He left her love notes throughout the house, hidden in refrigerator drawers or behind the soup. Their wedding was exactly suited to them in every way, and all who witnessed knew that they loved each other deeply and truly and without hesitation. And that should have been happily ever after.

But life is not a fairy tale and does not end when the prince marries the princess. And sometimes that is exactly as it should be, for love is hard to come by and harder to hold and when you have it you should cherish it for as long as possible, past the wedding night and on to the grocery trips and the late night cuddles and the fights and the make-ups and the life that you can build together. And this is what our couple had, for a time. A marriage as designed by Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. Their love was real, and deep, and able to withstand anything. Until it wasn't.

Because sometimes, too, it might have been better to stop at the wedding night, before the outside world breaks back in. No marriage exists in a bubble, and the partners are not the only members of said union. Parents-in-law, and bosses, and friends, and step-children, and neighbors all become part of your marriage too. Our couple was no exception, and lives, even the very best lives, are hard. There are bills to pay and pets to feed and children to clothe and so much to distract from just being each other being with each other.

He wanted so badly to provide for her. To give her the life he thought she wanted. To take her to beautiful places and to buy her beautiful things. So he left one day, to find his way. To find his vocation. He held her so tight and he promised her that he would return soon with a fortune, or at least the beginnings of one. And she held him so tight and she begged him not to go, for he was really all she needed in the world. He would not be swayed, so strong is the pull of desire that it feels more like need than the want it really is. Off he went, into the dark forest where anything could be lurking. She remained behind, holding on to the hope that was in his eyes as he walked away.

Forests contain within them the potential to be anything. A forest can be magical, a place of wildflowers and birdsongs and sunbeams that feels as though anything is possible and isn't that a wonderful thing. Or a forest can be dark and foreboding, a canopy that blocks the sun and haunts you with the fact that anything is possible and isn't that a frightening thing. This was the second kind of forest. The quiet was tangible, as thick as the mist that obscured weeping willows and yellow eyes that peer and assess. He didn't notice. He didn't see the dark shapes that prowled the fog, looking for dinner or something worse. He believed, and belief is a powerful thing. Belief starts wars and ends them. Belief brings people together and forces them apart. Belief makes you feel that everything you want is just around the corner if only you can get there. And he believed so hard, deep in his core, that he could change their lives if only he could find the right place, the right person, who would see in him all the things he could and should be. If only he had realized he'd already found that this story might be shorter.

Several short story rejections have me feeling a little dejected. To get myself out of a writer's rut, I decided to spend 30 minutes a day writing... something. Today I used a prompt to get the juices flowing, and this is the result. Not sure if I'll keep going with it or not, but it's an interesting start.

Prompt: A voracious reader starts noticing odd synchronicities in the books she's reading.

“This is the... 40th(?) one. He's just... hiding in the background. It doesn't matter the genre, it doesn't matter the print date. As recent as this year, as old as the written word. I find him everywhere.”

Ayden looks at my pile of books with his patented skepticism. He has always found my eccentricities a little annoying. The insistence on leaving out rice for the fae to count, the knocking three times. He pretends to ignore it, but I know he wishes I were a little less... me.

“Are you sure you aren't just picking up on a trope?”

“I swear it's not some coincidence or writing cliché. It's too specific. Will you please just look? I feel like I'm going crazy.”

Ayden sighs deeply. “Fine, show me.”

I have several books already open to the relevant pages. I pull him over to a large, leather bound tome first. “I think this was the first time I found him. At least, the first one I remember. He might have shown up before. But I read this one about a year and a half ago.”

I've highlighted the relevant paragraph. The book in question is a collection of myths and legends from around the world. In a story about the adventures of Sun Wukong, the mischievious monkey steals from a copper-haired farmer named Koh Lin. It's quick, only a line or two, but it stands out, in part because it is so brief. It has no impact on the story as a whole and seems thrown in.

“If he hadn't been a little incongruous I probably wouldn't have remembered him when I saw him again. But I got a little sense of deja vu.” I hand him the second example, a paperback fantasy novel. About a third of the way through the book the protagonists find themselves hiding in the barn of a farmer named Cailean, who's fiery temper matches his fiery hair.

I keep going down the line. A book on etymology written by Colin Farmer, whose author picture on the back cover shows a man with bright red hair. A children's book where a red fox named Cullin raises chickens on his farm. Pulpy sci-fi where a red-headed Callum is a pioneer on a new planet, helping to establish one of the first farms. An Arabic poem written by Khaleem Fallah, who a quick Google search reveals to have bright red hair.

“So, you see the pattern, right?” I look up at him, giving my best 'please don't think I'm mental' puppy-dog eyes.

“It is a weird coincidence, but I don't know, Andy, it still seems like just a coincidence. So there are a lot of authors who stick red-headed farmers with names that sound a little like Collin into their stories. That doesn't mean there's something supernatural happening.”

“It gets weirder now.” I say it quietly, a little afraid to show him the next bit. This is the part where either I'm right or I'm getting checked into a facility.

“Alice in Wonderland, Stranger in a Strange Land, Snow Crash, To Kill a Mockingbird. The Taming of the Shrew. Our Town. He's in all of them. He wasn't there before, Ayden. I swear he wasn't there before.”

“I think you've Mandela effected yourself, babe. I remember these passages, they've always been here.”

“Then why don't we talk about it? How many literary theory classes have we taken? Am I really the first person to notice that all of these works contain the same character? How could that be possible. You agree it's a weird coincidence. So why don't we study it, when we study why the curtains are blue? And why did I only start noticing it after?”

“You're traumatized, Andy. You nearly died and we still don't know what happened to him. You're seeing him everywhere. You really need to accept that he's gone. Did you see that therapist?”