Find the Word Tag Game
Tagged by both @inexorableblob and @ren-c-leyn! Thanks, friends!
Since I’m mainly a short story writer, I’ll be looking through all my short stories. And there are many. Hoo boy.
Rules: Find the four words in your writings then choose four more words for people you tag to find.Â
Puttin’ my tags up here because long post is long:
Bilbo Taggins:Â @quilloftheclouds, @cawolters, @waterfallwritings, @wasting-ink-not-youth, @mvcreates, @elisabethrosewrites, @dc-writes, @urbanteeth, @aslanwrites, and anyone else who thinks they can find my words:
I challenge you to find: haven, stick, door, and cling.
Alright, the indomitable @inexorableblob sent me on a scavenger hunt for walk, injury, grace, and tattoo.
Let’s see what we can find:
Walk | From All Our Painted Colors:Â
“I can handle it, Keema. Honestly, I haven’t really noticed,” I say, but I am lying. People have started to follow me with their eyes when I walk through the village. Some of them even keep to one side of the path when I pass by, and not out of respect. I can tell they are uneasy around me now.
and a bonus from an abandoned draft of space goofs because it’s funny:
“Enough, already.”Â
Eliza wasn’t working anymore. Her purple pencil was floating next to her head, where it had risen from being tucked away behind her ear as she whipped her head around to face him. The hem of her pants was dancing to the eighties music that came booming from the headphones bobbing around her neck.Â
“We can have fun up here, too,” Hector said, upside down and trying to walk along what he called the ceiling. He stepped over one of Eliza’s mission logbooks and kicked a packet of water toward her. The cap came off halfway through its trajectory, spilling blobs of water into the air. “Hey, it’s almost like snow!”
“I said enough, Hector.  We have a job to do up here. We can’t goof off all day.” She slung a sheet of paper his way, spinning it like a throwing star. He caught it in his mouth.
Injury | From a story I won’t name because spoilers:Â
“Because I will get mad again. And there won’t be a life-threatening injury to save you from another lecture.”
Grace | From “Aces High” (this one was super hard to find!):
Mike glances at the buttons on James’ backpack underneath the lunch table bench. There is one he recognizes: a coat of arms made with two crossed swords, a hammer straight between them, laid beneath a shield with an elaborate “L” stamped onto the metal. An emblem of honor and bravery in the face of evil, the crest of a prince fallen from grace, a medallion worn by the lost of the Eastern Kingdoms’ northern nation. You play Warcraft? Mike asks. James peers at him from the corner of his eye as he takes a small bite of the brownie.
Tattoo | From “Turning Tricks”:
Scanning the faces of the ten or so patrons who chose to be in such a place on a Saturday night, the man stopped short when he saw her. More accurately, when he saw the tattoo she had revealed with a casual scratch of her neck.
She gestured for him to sit down.
The lovely @ren-c-leyn has tasked me with discovering these words: monster, wink, blade, and sky.
It seems I write about the sky a lot.
Monster | From "Up Down All Around:” (the only monster I was able to find out of all my writing, too! And in the story where I did my best not to use any pronouns - Quinn is a genderqueer kid):
As soon as Quinn’s hand wrapped around the cup, a mechanical hiss sounded from the beneath the counter as the marble began to vibrate. Quinn dropped the cup, sending it clattering to the floor, and shot a glance out the window above the sink. The sky was dark, the moon out of view and the stars swallowed by the black night. Monsters eat stars and moons and little boys and girls, and Quinn jumped, back impacting the cabinet door. Quinn yanked it open and pushed inside, folding knobby knees into the grip of sweaty hands, and let the hinges flex and swing the door shut, eyes squeezed closed.
Wink | from “The Tin Man DJs on Weekday Nights in Jersey:”
“Subtle.”
Andy tosses him an obvious wink, throwing her whole face into it.
“Is that how you get the boys to like you?”
“Don’t limit my options, Timothy.”
[Andy is pan-aro as hell]
Blade | From “Mile Marker 72:”
He walked around to the back of the truck and braced the longer plank against the ground before taking the saw in hand and cutting into the wood. The cutting was slow. Aldo stopped every few dips of the blade to check if the cut was straight and measure the depth with the side of the other plank.
Sky | I have a lot of these! Weird. From All Our Painted Colors:
“Your time will come, Teva. If not today, then tomorrow,” he says, washing the symbols of the land from my shoulders. Bones once again become a part of me, no longer limbs of the earth stretching under my surface like hot stone. Blue slides into my eyes, stealing my sight for the space of a breath. Sarevo’s fingers wipe it away. I see the sky in his eyes.
