Tag: family

Today I am Gifted

On By TheQuilledSisterIn Uncategorized

The Story

I can see.

This is one of those first not-thoughts a baby probably has. You spend nine (coughTENANDAHALF) months cooped up in a dark safe space and then AHHHH AHHHH shluuuurk there’s light and sound and some weirdo counting your offshoots. It’s no wonder we enter this world screaming.

It’s so damn bright.

The mammal eyeball is arguable among scientists to be the most complex evolved organ. There are some biologists, whose papers are still under review, who would like to argue that the jellyfish rhopalia is even more complex, and its mysteries are still hidden within the divine.

To this I resolutely say: So? That’s still an eye. Dang, why are we arguing about eyeballs? Or, excuse me, visual-interpretive physiology.

It’s all very complicated. Pupils and ocellis and gook. Yet not a single one of us: human, jellyfish, bat, butterfly, bird, even those mantis shrimp who can perceive all those extra colors, can adjust to see as fast as a light can shine.

We are all weak to the bursting illumination. It is so damn bright.

Conclusion being, I should not have felt too embarrassed to find out the deafening scream shaking my soul was coming from my own throat.

Because oh my actual God that was an angel.

“Be not afraid.”

“HOLY FUCK!”

“Be not afraid, Steven Winters, for we come with-“

“HOLY. FUCK. WHAT THE HELL.”

There was a long, silent pause. Perhaps they were trying to give me a moment. I needed far more than a moment.

“Steven Winters, we come to you with a-“

“OH MY GOD. SWEET JESUS.”

Perhaps it was the painfully intense rouge of the sunset, but in a short moment of awareness, it seemed that the hundreds of eyes squinted in irritation.

A hum moved through the air.

“Steven Winters, we come to you with a path-“

“OH. MY. GOD. ARE YOU FUCKING ANGELS?”

I was apparently still alive and in a timeline that had some sort of relevance to my own, because I did have a millisecond to recognize this was a stupid question.

Because if not angels, what else were they? Everything I’d heard or seen (admittedly, in amateur horror films) about demons were dark and/or red, and these… Beings? Were, well, I’m not entire sure what color pure light is. I’d like to say white, but it’s more so such a brightness that color bows out of the equation.

I swear I heard a sigh.

“Be not afraid, Steven Winters, we come with good news.”

Oh damn, maybe I was dead.

Because let me tell you- I am no shepherd. I mean, I shepherd a couple technical deployments for government branches who are planning on launching missiles before all the other government branches I also work for do, but I don’t feel like that’s the same as sheep, despite what some politicians say.

The only alive people I could think of that angels spoke to were shepherds and virgins. And thanks to Charlene Carol sophomore year, I wasn’t that either.

“AM I DEAD?”

I could not stop shouting. Honestly, I wished I could. I felt rude. But you see a being made from God’s first drafts and keep a level tone, then you can judge.

“Steven Winters, you shall live. You shall live on the path chosen for you alone, which we bring to you this day and-“

“HOW MANY LANGUAGES CAN YOU SPEAK?”

Where this question came from, I do not know. But I’d been working with our AI agent on understanding foreign characters so I could suggest turn it off and back on again to international spies researchers, so perhaps it was just on the brain.

There was the not-squint again. I was perhaps testing eternal patience.

“We can speak to all His Children, despite their language. You may hear us in your tongue.”

I nodded back as if this was normal. As if my backyard frequently hosted the divine. I glanced towards the grill, abandoned when a great thundering announced the presence of my current guests. Should I offer them a tuna steak? My mother had instilled host priorities deep into my bones, surely that applied to the other worldly. Or this worldly. Next worldly. Whatever.

Plus it would make an okay excuse to get take a second, get my heartbeat under control. I gestured with my tongs at the grill in a (what I hoped was) universal want some? conveyance.

The many eyes opened wider, and an orange shimmer skipped over the many encircling rings hovering a few feet above my bird feeder.

“Yes, Steven Winters. We would love a tuna steak.”

“Faaaaaantastic. Sauce?” Food was a language I understood.

The warm hum filtered through the air again. Then, “We will receive the offering spiced only.”

I pulled the fish from the grill. Despite the unique interlude, it was a perfect medium rare. I plucked a piece of cilantro from my scraggly herb garden and placed it atop the best looking slice.

Hesitantly, I placed the plate at the mossy ground before sticking a fork in the piece I prepared for myself. It had a little char, but I liked it that way.

I opened my mouth to ask how to better serve the angelic being (do they need cutlery?), but before I could, I saw the plate was already empty.

“Thou art kind and artful with the meat given of the waters, Steven Winters.”

“I, uh, thank you,” I said, navigating a large piece into my mouth with my shaking fingers to stop talking. It was indeed the best tuna I had ever cooked. I unashamedly moaned. Must remember to re-up my subscription to Penny’s Spices.

There were several moments of silence passed between us. The evening cooled, the dusk overturned to dark. A few bats soared out from the house I had set up for them, but spotting the bright being, scattered to the trees for shelter. My neighbor loudly strolled his garbage bin to the end of his driveway, waved casually at me, and returned inside.

“Steven Winters.”

“Yes. So sorry. Never had literal divine intervention before.”

“Mmm. Mmhmm. Be not afraid.”

“You very much hesitated that time,” I pointed at it with my fork, because I was clearly insane and apparently manners were the first thing to go, “so I feel like afraid is maybe something I should consider.”

“No, Steven Winters. Thou wilt receive a gift.”

“But is this like a genie gift? Where it seems like a gift but it’s really a curse?”

I knew I was pushing it. My soul ricocheted inside me from the tip of my forehead to my slippered toes, as if pacing itself through my horrible decisions. I couldn’t help myself. I had been a good kid in Sunday school! I knew Abraham had to psychologically torture his own kid. Mary had to leave her home and straight up had to watch her son get killed! Moses gets blocked from paradise, Hagar got lost in the desert, Jacob? maybe Job, it’s been a while, had to freaking wrestle divinity itself! I was not in comfortable angel-witnessing company. Yet I pushed.

“I’m just saying, y’all’s track record-“

“Steven. Winters.”

Oh yeah, I had upset them. Too bad shutting-up was not among my talents: “You have to be at the wrong place.”

Because I was a nobody. Not in the way Mary was a Nobody, quietly descended from King David and righteous in all her actions. No no- I was born a white, dirty blond, 5’9″ Presbyterian, barely baptized by unenthusiastic parents, drank too much and had not made it past a situationship with a reputable woman. These shiny things had landed in the wrong backyard. Or! Or. Or I was having a very hallucinative seizure. I hadn’t quite ruled that out yet.

“The Lord Your God does not lead astray.”

Oh okay, then explain Charlene Carol, but whatever. At least I had almost recovered control of my vocal cords.

“What can I… do for his… His. Lordship?”

The being seemed to shimmer with satisfaction. Cool cool cool.

“Steven Winters. You are shown a path into the wilderness. Your Lord God chooses you to lead His children into a place of safety until the storm hath passed you by.”

Oh good. A Noah-level task. I could barely put my Ikea furniture together with an automatic screwdriver and a six pack. I should really not be trusted with an ark.

Before I could object- and I was going to object- there was a noisy rustling around me. Cinnamon, a deer I had so named due to her gorgeous dusky copper fur, stepped out from my hydrangeas with her spotted twins and several unfamiliar siblings. A raccoon family pulled themselves from under my shed while two possums loaded with their litter skittered down from my half-dead oak trees. The few bats I had thought ran off settled next to the wrens on my fence, as multiple hummingbirds buzzed by my ears. I looked down at my leg to inspect a new sensation, seeing the mainecoon-ish stray cat I’d been calling Booger curling around my feet.

“These… children?”

I turned to set my plate down, but it was gone and my hands were free. Fine.

“Steven Winters.” I swear the voice that made my bones buzz sounded happily tempered now, “Much is to come. You are to go into the mountains. You are to lead His Children up the path. At the peak, where His sun rises and sets, you will find a home where you will remain until you are Called.”

I looked at all the creatures peeking nervously back at me. There were hooves and fangs and wings. I had placed feeders to lure them, traps to dissuade them, and now I was to lead them?

“Well. Alright then,” I felt suddenly solid, decision made, “can I… can I get a stick? A stick seems good.” All the best guys in stories had a stick.

A staff appeared in my right hand. It was twisted gray driftwood, yet sturdy in the soft ground.

“God be with you, Steven Winters.”

The Beings, the light, the tuna steak, were gone.

Just me and my new stick and a bunch of wide-eyed forest creatures.

Cool cool cool.

“Alright gang,” I said, feeling two of the bats settle on the hood of my sweatshirt, “let’s get going.”

The Word

Gifted (adj): having exceptional talent or natural ability.

How many of us were in the “gifted” program in Elementary/Middle/High school? How many of us thought that would do literally anything for us in the adult world?

Me. I did.

It’s several years too late to talk to Gen-X and Millennials about the trauma we accrued from Gifted Programs. But settling into the other side of young-adulthood, it’s really sinking in that no one is coming to deliver us from the regular class to play mathematical board games.

For me, this lesson came HARD in my first job- where my naturally bubbly personality was viewed as ignorant and flirtatious. It wasn’t enough to be right, I had to be right in the right way. I had to dull my gift to be seen as the correct kind of shiny. I hated it, I still hate it, and I feel deeply for a world we could have where we were actually ourselves and the work got done.

Today was a particularly hard day for “gifted doesn’t mean everything is a gift to you” lessons. I stared it in the face, and crumbled. I had to call for backup, I had to rally the reinforcements, I had to drink some wine and cry.

And from that turmoil came Steven Winters. Who is nobody. Who just happened to be exceptionally good at math in his younger years, and although it got him a scholarship, all it’s done since then is make his life monotony. Until he finds a much greater Gift than Gifted is upon him whether he likes it or not.

I hope the same for all us formally-Gifted kids. That, if we haven’t already, we might find that bearing of purpose in a tumultuous sea of expectations. Wouldn’t it be pleasant if someone just told us which way to go? Alas, we are not all Steven Winters.

Just a note- I am totally plugging Penzy’s Spice. Or I tried. But autocorrect kept making it “Penny’s” so I gave up and decided it was a sign about copywright or something. Anyway, Penzy’s Spices is awesome.

Happy reading, my dears. And may a compass always be nearby when you feel lost.

Today I am Mislaid

On By TheQuilledSisterIn Uncategorized

The Story

Her cheek is cool to the touch, just as it was the last time I spoke to her. My fingers run across the smoothness of it. Where my index should hitch slightly on a dense scar left from an unlucky training day, it slides unhindered.

Disappointing.

She would have preferred they captured all her truths in the stone. It’s some sort of marble or quartz, I imagine, based on the regal flashes of white and sparkling gray shooting through her unseeing eyes. Though the unruly sea of her hazels are lost, they did manage to capture the feeling that she was always looking beyond the here. I silently commend the artists for this ability. Even now I’m tempted to turn to see what has caught her attention. To catch a glimpse of the world through her eyes.

I resist and quickly walk away before the urge to throw my weight against the object overtakes- before realizing the satisfying crash of precious artwork turned scattered rock across the pathway.

Her cheek should not be smooth.

It should be worn over by sun and wind. Cracked open again and again, scarred over with a larger map of her adventures. It should be wrinkled, crumpled into so many laugh lines as children and grandchildren illuminate her with pride. It should be warm and smiling, paling as her explosive youth fades into relaxed retirement. Not smooth. Not cold. Not gone.

They never mention this part in the prophesies. I suppose it would give too many would-be heroes pause. My first captain had warned us long ago: “The old write, and the young die for the words written.”

And now, the old mourn.

“Why did it have to be you?” I whisper to the garden and then again to the stars. I ask not for the first time, not for the last.

My cheek is wrinkled. Damp now with a few tears I’ll claim are just these old eyes if someone spots me. My name is in history books. History it’s called, already. Though one would not find me in the archives nearly as often as her. For many of the reports and legends, I am just “and her companions.“ No drinking songs tell of those beside her, exult us like the popular “Fair her, our champion, gaze upon her waves! We fight for her, we love for her, she who bears no knaves!” Which no one would believe, but it was I that wrote most of those verses; on a night of deep sorrow and even deeper drinks, and I had just wanted to make her laugh with a rhyme. Like I had when we were children.

There is a painting in one of Levliants’ Great Halls, of our entire company where I am beside her. A carving somewhere in the Alden Library as well, I have been told, with she and I at the front.

Thankfully, most people do not recognize me anymore. For just like her, that version of me has remained unchanged. The song still shouts of a crew strong and sure. The etchings boost of a people with bright eyes and steady souls. Yet I have had the great privilege and punishment to survive beyond such things.

I knew she was The Chosen One from the moment she opened her eyes. She was crying, our mother was crying, hell the nurse was crying from how many hours we had been stuck in that hot room together trying to wrestle my sister into this world.

I swaddled her as the nurse tended my mother, counted her fingers and toes and odd freckles. That baby felt heavy in a strange way. Not in that she was a large one, though she was and my mother never let her forget it. But that I felt I was holding both my baby sister and the weight of the whole world. I feared if I set her down, she would have to carry it all herself. In the months to come, my mother accused me of not letting her learn to walk for saddling her on my hip! So from the moment I set her down, I barely left her side. If the fate of the world was her burden to carry, then she would be mine.

Our people were made from the very first dust. Our stories some of the first spoken. In all of the many tales, there was always a Chosen One, a Special Champion, a Someone that came and saved us all from evil doing. I never imagined I would know one, let alone love one. Never dreamed I would lose one.

The great battles came. The war cries were called. The charges charged. And all happened as it was meant to, according to the lines covered in dust. Even though I stepped in front of her. Even though I watched every move, tried to guard every angle. Still, she stood before everything, and bled.

There will come one, born into a great wailing. Marked with the second moon and evening stars. Only to impart peace upon the grounds with the rain of their very life.

Saving our world, and plunging mine into darkness.

When she last closed her eyes and they took her from my arms to the pyre, it was the lightest she’d ever been.

I follow now the path of the garden to a stand of trees, ducking beneath cobwebs and owls’ nests. Through the darkness, my feet know the way. To the solid stone, cool and dead as she. I pull the vines from its crevasses, my fingers lingering across the rough granite. This is where her memorial should be- where she truly last stood, and from her very self closed the door against the evil that tried to overtake us all.

I press against it, as if it might give way. I swear on the moon I can hear their voices. The voices of the rest of our company, calling and mourning her as they did that first night.

But I am alone. And have to remain.

The Word

Mislaid (noun, past tense): Unintentionally put (an object) where it cannot readily be found and so lose it temporarily.

After a YouTube spiral into cleaning grave markers, I kept coming back to the statues of those lost, and the effect that must have had on those who survived them. What part of a person’s likeness do you honor? The best moment, their most recent, their bravest? And once we’ve chosen- how do we know we are honoring the dead instead of placating the living?

.

.

.

So… who remembers The Called?

***spoiler warning!***

While it remains my constant effort to make each story stand on its own, I do also try to make them part of a whole; I want them to fit together less like puzzle pieces, and more like the rounding hedges of a maze. And if you’ve been here a while, you know the members of The Called pop up in many, MANY of my stories, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so much. I’ve decided to go back and give their solo tales the much needed attention that such dedicated warriors deserve, bringing their stories up to par and ensuring their effects on the series as a whole. But for so long, I have wanted to tell their start. Where did the Door come from? Who locked it, and why? Now we get a glimpse from the other side of the mysterious Door, and a little hint for why it was sealed.

I promise to mark any updated story with some sort of signal, and leave an original somewhere on this blog (for we must honor our mistakes originals).

Happy reading!

P.S. Liked this story? There’s now a Companion Story!

Today I am Furor

On By TheQuilledSisterIn Uncategorized

The Story

“Storm.”

“Absolutely not,” she strode across the room to stand just a few feet from me, her long navy jacket flowing behind her like a cape, “you need to take this seriously.”

“I am taking this seriously.”

“No, you’re not. If you were, you’d know we have already had a hundred Storms, and a hundred more variations on Storm: Storm Bringer, Storm Shaker, Storm Leader, Hailstorm, Hailstrum, Tempest, Cyclone, even Icy The Storm- and yes in every language. Squall, Thunder, Thunderstorm, Lightening, Cloudburst-“

“Cloudburst?”

“Yes, it’s when clouds… burst… into a storm.” She was rubbing her temples now. It made the silver streaks she often pushed behind her ears fall forward.

“How about Stratus? Strat-miss?”

“Al’s family tree is clouds, as you well know.”

“Oh, right. How about Gale?”

“Just… no.”

This is not how I imagined this moment going. I thought there would be a little fanfare, some well-mannered celebrating. At least a glass of champagne.

Instead I was in my aunt’s basement, with her friend Tidal, spending more time on my code name than acknowledging that I had passed every single test to get into the Guild of Underground Atmospheric Guardians for Earth, or GUAGE.

I started training when I was eleven years old, after accidentally calling a lightening strike to the neighborhood pool. It was a perfectly sunny summer day, the sky as blue as a berry and clear as glass. A teenage boy wouldn’t stop dunking my little brother and I in the deep end, holding one of us in the water until the other was able to tackle his arm, and then he’d switch victims. My fury and distress manifested as I saw the bubbles rising above my brother again, and the next moment the teen is screaming, lifeguards are whistling like an off key orchestra, and my mother is pulling me from the water, already on the phone with her sister.

“She’s done it,” my mother whispered into the mouthpiece, wrapping towels around my brother and me, “Yes! Lightening. No no, no one’s hurt. Yes, we’re on the way the home- meet us there.” She smiled down at me while the other parents’ faces were creased with worry and shouting for their children.

And then it started. Weekends out in the mountains to practice, tudors for every science class, a full ride to Cornell in Meteorology. While my roommates gallivanted off in search of the next house party, I stayed behind to monitor the tiny cyclone I’d stirred up in my tea mug.

With graduation, came the tests. I had withstood hurricanes, conjured hail, recoiled tornadoes, was even given the Rainbow Ribbon for passing all the trials with literally flying colors. But no, I was disappointing Aunt Lynda because I couldn’t come up with a unique code name.

“Do I have to decide this now?”

“You will be a part of GUAGE for the rest of your life, my dear. You will hopefully have a legacy. And most importantly, everyone in the guild knows you’re my niece. So I cannot have the family name ruined with a bad… family name.”

Her green eyes glinted behind her thick glasses. I think I did sense some pride in there, almost doused by the seriousness she was trying to express to me with her perfectly shaped eyebrows.

“Well, if you’re Disdo-Ma’ameter, maybe I should be an instrument too.”

Her forefinger stopped digging into her right temple so she could place her hand on my shoulder instead, “It’s got to feel right. I appreciate the sentiment, but we don’t need a Baro-Ma’meter and so on. Because then they all start to sound stupid.”

I sat back down in the brown, practically wilting, lazyboy. I watched Tidal watch me for a minute. Then I turned my gaze to the arm of the chair, and began picking at a loose thread.

I’d wanted to be part of GUAGE since the very beginning. When Aunt Lynda burst into our foyer, hair wet with rain and eyes on fire, she scooped me up and held me tightly. “It’s a downpour out there! Well done! We’ve got one, Lacy!” she called to my mother as she twirled me. Then she set me down, pulled a wrinkled and torn journal from her bag, and told me about GUAGE. She held my hand from that moment to when I took my vows, just an hour ago.

“We are the weathermen, the weatherwomen, the weather people of the world. We are the wind in the hurricane, the ice in the blizzard. We are the gauge of the world, for the world. I take these vows to monitor, interpret, and engage with the atmosphere of our world for the betterment of all peoples, everywhere.”

I’d known the lines for a decade. Hell I could say them in Latin.

Next I would get my assignment: Once assimilated into GUAGE, I would be either put onto a search team, or made into a small TV personality to guard my assigned region. I secretly was hoping for the search team. How amazing would it be to scope out the very ends of the earth and even outside of it- to see the real forces we were interacting, and occasionally fighting, with.

But alas, I’d inherited by mother’s cherry curls and my father’s wide mouth, so I was destined to entice the elderly and the morning people with my winning personality on Channel 4. And you know, occasionally keep them alive by taking on the arrant tsunami while making it look like I’d just misread a rain watch. The usual.

“Surge…” I watched her eyebrow rise with suspicion, “…ess? Surgess?”

The eyebrow froze, then softened. Then she turned completely towards Tidal.

He nodded, grumbling, “The last Surgess passed away over 30 years ago, it’s up for grabs and doesn’t have much of its own legacy yet.”

“Then it’s perfect.” Aunt Lynda, the Disdo-Ma’ameter beamed at me finally, “Tidal, let everyone know, Surgess will take her place in Fort Myers by dawn.”

She hugged me tightly, then held me at arms length to stare right at me.

“Fort Myers? Storm central.” I whispered in awe.

“You’ve earned it. So now the real work begins.”

The Word

Furor (noun): An outbreak of public anger or excitement; a wave of enthusiastic admiration, a crazy.

This was directly inspired by the snow predicted for my city being over 4 hours late. And then I got the silly idea that weathermen/women/people predict things wrong on purpose sometimes, for of course superhero reasons- like they’re battling a large ice monster, they need to get an old lady safely back in her house before a hurricane, or they want to get their milk and bread from the store before everyone else.

Sometimes, stories don’t have to have a deeper meaning or magical inspiration. Sometimes, stories and prompts can just be fun. Like a snowday 😉