#goatsgomoo

Charlotte Bronte was a sucker! No, no, kidding, kidding! I’ll do it properly. [ahem]

It’s a trendy unisex name, everyone thought. Of course that was what the hipster liberal yuppies would name their new baby. Of fucking course it was. 

What was strange though was that no one could tell if the baby was a boy or a girl. Well, that in and of itself wasn’t so strange, but even the new parents weren’t sure. 

“It’s a boy,” the mother said.

“It’s a girl,” the father said.

They’d each taken turns changing the diaper, they each had seen... and if you asked them on different days, they’d give different answers. The new grandparents chalked it up to liberal nonsense about “not wanting to ‘inflict’ a gender on the baby” or some such. 

No one asked why ‘Bronte’ either, assuming it was a reference to one of the novel-writing Bronte sisters. The new mother had been a literature major after all, and though the new father was a more staid businessman, he was an avid reader, like his wife. Surely that was why.

No one knew that the name had come to the parents on the night of the child’s birth: a night so stormy that they hadn’t been able to make it to the hospital through the downpour and had had to have the baby here, at home. 

No one knew that this child wasn’t entirely human.

No one knew that Bronte could also mean “thunder.”

Well, that’s one good thing to come out of Facebook screenshotting all my popular posts. XD Thanks!

it’s happening!

((OMG. WELL THEN… with apologies to @tybunnythehellmoose for grabbing Anna at the end there))

Grant glared at the stack of papers on his desk. In this day, in this marvelous digital age, how the ever-living FUCK was there THIS MUCH PAPER he still had to deal with? 

Fuck this, I’m getting coffee. He stood from his chair so quickly that it shot backwards. He let it roll and headed for the break room.

Johnson, Flowers, and Somerset were all in there, laughing and talking. They straightened up when he walked in, but he shook his head. “No, no, it’s okay, I’m just in sore need of coffee,” he said. “Please, do continue having a good day.”

“Sorry, boss,” Somerset said. “We were just talking about awkward dates.”

“You had to have had some,” Flowers pressed, swooping into his personal space as he pulled a mug out. “Dish!”

“You know I’m your boss, right?” he asked, reaching for the pot.

“I also know who you’re married to.”

Grant stopped and turned to face him. “Aaaaaand, that means what exactly?”

“Ford, c’mon.” That was Johnson, who had been around long enough to have been Grant’s peer at one point. “We all know what she’s like. Sometimes I’ve questioned whether she’s a robot or not.”

“She’s not a robot,” he replied, feeling the need to defend the love of his life. But, before she’d been the love of his life, she’d been hell on goddamn Earth to him, and so he couldn’t help grinning as he added, “But we did have the most awkward third date in history, I’m pretty sure.”

They gathered around with their coffee mugs, like overgrown children looking forward to story time. 

And Grant just grinned wider, raised his mug to them, pressed past them and headed back to his office. The ringing sound of disappointment followed after him, and he felt so much better.

He closed the door of the office behind him, set his mug down on the desk, and sat down, leaning back in his chair and smiling at the memory. Then he set the thus-far-untouched coffee aside and headed back to his paperwork, smile still plastered on his face. He paused, then picked up his phone.

[Remember our third date?]

                                                              [What brought this up?]

[Just reminiscing]

                                  [I can smell a lie through the phone, Ford]

[No, you can’t, and I was. Remember it?]

                                                                 [Yes, of course. Why?]

[Let’s try it again tonight. What do you say?]

There was a long pause before she answered.

                         [You’re on, buddy. If you think you can keep up.]