JASON FUHRMAN

Fiction Author

Jason Fuhrman

Worth 1000 Words | EP 39 | Hardboiled

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One of my favorite genres, when done well. I don’t write in it often, so this was a good exercise for me to get out of my comfort zone. And, let’s just say, it was one of the longest comfort zones I found myself in while doing these stories. Is that Raymond Chandler turning in his grave?

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Jules Auger

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q9zd9n

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

The sun could’ve given Grant a closer shave than his razor. Sharp didn’t begin to describe it. A hot edge that broiled the empty street.

Grant scratched his chin around the nick. Swollen. Ready to split. Ruin his new shirt. Hah. Five years new. Stippled like one of those canvases the urbane bastards gawked at while sipping overpriced juice. Why he bought patterned shirts. Ones without didn’t go well in his line of work.

Grant toed the sun’s edge. Felt that anger through chewed leather and wool socks. That cut worked its way up to his cut. Son of a bitch made his eyes water and the rest of his face needle. A good shave was hard to come by. Fuck if that wasn’t a cliche. But the streets were full of them.

Long shadows clung the smell of piss and regrets sleeping off what they could. Shame no one respected the streets like he did. Floor to ceiling. The floor starting beneath the street, infested with rats and shit. He’d put some there himself. The ceiling ending at the stars where he’d seen many of those rats and shits bawl their last wishes, as if they were anything more than smoking bullet holes on a black wall.

He dragged a match over the part he always missed under his nose. Sulfur and wood burned. He supressed a cough, dug out the thing that had led him here. A crushed can. Reyno-Cola. Never heard of it. The last sips circled the lip as he swirled the can. He sniffed it. Smelled like it should, but not how he wanted. A whiff of tobacco, cologne, hell, even the grease smears of the steak from a last meal, because it would be. Nobody in the city got up this early. Breakfast was out of the question.

The name had led him here. Antique store. Tagged shutters, vomitting mail slot, window split into triangles leading to a center that just might have a clue. Grant crossed that moat of hellfire, stopping long enough to look straight into that fiery eye of a source to wink a “fuck you” in case it though he had been hiding from it.

He planted a foot on the bottom stair, only one more leading to the door that no on respected. Angled his toe up. Felt that stretch in his calf. Inhaled. Deeply. He blew a smoky kiss to his fragmented reflection. Didn’t let it all go, snorting the last of it, rolling it around his mouth, then swallowed. Exhaled nothing.

Mail told him nothing. Advertisements with CURRENT RESIDENT slathering barcoded labels. He dropped one, and it slid beneath the door. Halfway though. It was thick in the middle, like him.

He picked it up, turned it over. Something about the weight of it said more than the anonymity. He grinned around his cigarette at the thought of opening someone else’s mail being a federal crime. Pictured those old boys in too-short shorts trying to haul him away because the cops had better things to do.

He gutted the envelope, let his eyes fall on fresh entrails. He’d read something once about a religion reading entrails, so he honored them. Fucking Romans. A credit card glued to the center, teetering on something more than glue. Raised numbers, a raised name. M. Marshall. Fuck if he didn’t hate people who had double initials. Like their parents thought they were clever or something, as if a child was an avatar to fulfill some derivative dream they hadn’t been able to. Meanwhile the child would grow up to be a failure, get in too deep to nurse that failure, owe money, owe lives, owe things grander than the dreams of those two pathetic parents who probably thought the world of the sack of shit still, unaware that he was nothing more than what crawled and festered in the sewer, where he would soon be, once Grant found him. Which would be soon.

They liked to use his name when begging. “Grant, please this. Grant please that.” Maybe if they said it enough its literal meaning would manifest into reality and they’d live another day. Fuck if it would. He wasn’t one of those double-initial pricks who bent to tears or money. All had offered both.

Grant cocked his head, watching his reflection divide, shrink, grow. A shadow painted on the wall across the street with clean lines. He took a drag, which illuminated the hint of a nose, a lipless mouth, hollow face. Marred by that one spot he hadn’t taken care to prevent. His third eye apparently lived on the side of his cleft chin that was bigger than the other, blocky, pain in the ass to shave. Too many punches or too much of Pops’s biological signature.

The AC kicked on, rat-a-tatting the tin roof. Grant ducked as if gunshots. His already irregular heartbeat found more irregularity, cigarette tumbling to his feet sparking cinder pollen. Onto something he hadn’t noticed.

Ignition. He stomped out the fire, picked up the remains. A one-sheet menu. Benny’s. The only bar-owner who had ever, in all of history, mailed menus. Near-blackened on the kids’ menu–Grant laughed at that–just below Apple Juice was Reyno-Cola: NEW!

Shame no one respected the streets like Grant did. Floor to ceiling. Too bad he’d spent too much time staring at the wall. Could’ve been sooner, maybe give him enough time to grab a bite. Benny would be opening soon, for him anyway. Because old Benny’s mitts were all over this. Benny Benson. Magnitudes worse than a double initial. Son of himself. Son of a bitch.

Grant gagged the mailslot again with the thick envelope, kept the menu. It was a long walk to Benny’s from here. He patted his gut. That was all right with him. He tossed the can onto a dogpile of garbage bags, took another drag, rounding the Reyno Antique Store to pay a visit to a man who was the son of himself.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 38 | Hrani Grobi

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An intriguing title I should have looked up the meaning of first. However, that would have yielded a different story I’m sure. And I discuss this at length in the video, but one of my favorite things about storytelling is that you ever only take one possible path when infinite ones are available. I always wonder where those other paths lead.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Igor Galkin

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bKn4Rk

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

The candle’s flame was cold. It flickered, and a thread of smoke lifted into the air, so Merryn knew it was real. She thought to touch it, but she couldn’t bring her hands from the sheet eaten by time. Barely there, it was. However, she enjoyed the hearty threads on her palms, and she sent her fingertips to explore its surface.

It was dark here, except for the faint candle light, but after a time, the moon showed itself, and when she saw what it revealed, she nearly screamed. Walls, high and coarse with stone were dressed in foul whispers that came from dark places tunneled within them. If she could only bring her hands to her ears to silence those whispers. If she could only bring her hands to her eyes to hide what the moonlight revealed. It showed her more than walls festooned with empty holes that breathed horror. It brought the truth of what lay before her. No longer were her hands or the sheet caressed with the warm tones of the candle. The silver moon struck her naked with its frigid gaze, leaving her alone but for the emptiness of a mausoleum.

She dropped to her knees, because it would at least limit her view, and she pressed her face into the hanging sheet. She would bring it back to its former glory. She was good with her hands, with a needle and thread. She would repay it for the comfort it had given her in this terrible place.

Comfort didn’t last long, for she saw through the sheet to see nothing beneath what she had assumed was a table. This was not a table at all but a box without legs. It had to be the dust, her reeling mind, that conjured such illusions. Perhaps she needed to stand again, allow the blood to flow where it needed.

So, she did and was greeted by a ghostly face. It hovered there, expressionless in the gloom. Still, she could not move her hands to run away. They wanted to remain, grounded to the only thing she could feel, and soon the rest of her was possessed by their desire.

The face belonged to a woman, smooth of skin and gentle of eye, her beauty not sullied by the sharp rays of the moon. She did not speak, merely touched the wick of an unlit candle opposite the other Merryn had not noticed. When the woman removed her finger, a flame sprung to life, as cold as the other.

“These fragile things will do nothing to warm you up,” the woman said. “Here, let me.” And she went to Merryn, took the shawl from her shoulders and draped it over Merryn’s.

“Better?” the woman said into her. Her breath smelled of nothing.

Merryn nodded, unable to trust her voice.

The woman returned to her spot opposite Merryn, hands mirroring her own.

“This place is not to be feared, child,” the woman said. “It’s dark and cold and smells of both, but you will find comfort here. Soon.”

“I don’t want to find anything but the way out,” Merryn said, surprising herself. She pressed her lips together and swallowed her tongue.

The woman glanced at Merryn’s hands, smiled softly before gazing back into her eyes. “This place isn’t always so dreary, child. The skylight there, it welcomes the sun when the time is right. I am sorry that time is not now. You will love to bask in her glory, hear her laughter. Her secrets. Feel her touch.”

Merryn felt something at that moment, as if the sun had found its way here, through the candles’ flames. Warmth, growing from her fingernails, over her knucles, to her wrists, burrowing up her sleeves to reach–

“Her heart,” the woman said. “The sun is a she, didn’t you know?” The woman chuckled distant wind chimes.

“When?” Merryn said.

“Oh, it’s difficult to tell anymore. She is a tricky one. Generous but fickle at times. More than anything, you mustn’t fear her brother, who wraps us in his steel blanket now. Only when the family is complete, shall she show herself and take you into her arms.”

“I don’t understand,” Merry said. “Why am I here? Why can’t I move … my … hands?” Tears squeezed from her eyes.

“Look there,” the woman said nodding behind Merryn.

Merryn saw a cloaked man, his hands arranged similarly to hers atop what she now saw resembled the legless box before her, floating, unquestionably housing a corpse. The man blew out the single candle there and was one with the smoke left behind. The coffin rose higher and higher, its shadow moving across the ground toward her like a pit to consume her.

Merryn wept, tore her hands from what she knew now was a coffin beneath her own hands, stumbled back a few steps until the gaze of the woman found her and brought her back.

“Good,” the woman said. “She accepts you. You accept her.”

“I accept no one!” Merry shrieked. “Show me from this place.”

“If only I could. But that is not my duty, child. It is yours.”

Merryn ran away from the woman, into the darkness, guiding herself along the walls, but no matter how far she went, she always came back to where she started, her hands where they started.

“All roads lead to home,” the woman said.

Home. Merryn’s hands revisited the peaks, the valleys. The imperfections that were perfect. Like family.

Merryn felt the candles’ flames. Their invitation. She blew out one, then the other. Around her, other coffins rose toward the moonlight to where she would shortly go. And hope to find the sun.

“Beautiful, no?” the woman said, admiring the display. “I never tire of it.”

Merryn watched her fingers swirl into gray tendrils, then her arms, then all of her until she could watch no longer. Her heart, though, she could feel, and it burned as warm and as bright as the sun.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 37 | Hive

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An amazing style you don’t frequently see in contemporary commerical art. I love the combination of the old world style with the modern themes. This artwork led me to a strange place, one I feel could be expanded upon. Who know, one day I may revisit it.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Morten Vlademir Motsar

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0nW3dK

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

No other trees grew there, so they were easy to find. If they were trees at all.

Leafless, nearly branchless, he could make out all of their detail for some time. The walk had been long, and he had dreaded the gnarled forms growing into view, but the walk had to be made. He didn’t know why, nor thought to question why. It was a walk they had all made, his many fathers and mothers, none of whom were truly his own, but they loved him all the same. They told him he’d know the answer when he arrived, and that he’d find joy. He played the voices over and over in his head to search between them for meaning until they deteriorated into the scratch of an old record.

He stopped because his foot was sore from the walking, but also from something else. Pebbles somehow always made it into his boot no matter how tightly he tied the laces. Untying them now would take some time, and the pain wasn’t so bad, so he made his way down the meandering path that led right between the two trees, through a space that allayed the fear and the mystery that he’d carried since leaving home.

Birds darted in discordant flocks, and he expected them to land on one of the few branches, but they never did, choosing flight over rest and perhaps a grub lodged in the old wood. He thought about this concept, of labor over rest, and how he had been granted the latter ever since he had been a child, told the mind would always outlast a body. Another thing he had never questioned until now, and he had seen many of them deteriorate in mind before body. Perhaps it was the years taking their toll. Unbalanced strain.

His pace quickened at this notion of unbalance, that pebble nipping his sole more and more. Even though they had allowed him the most mimimal of activity, he had exercised in secret. Rearranging cords of wood, digging holes, then burying them again, careful to remove the upper layer of grass first so no evidence of a hole would be left.

So why were his joints sore, fingers stiff? It was cold, and the walk had been long. The trees didn’t look so ominous anymore, the scoops of their trunks inviting.

He smiled, felt the vibration of a sigh across his vocal cords as his boots found pleasure in uprooting stone after stone to keep the path clear, an activity he hadn’t realized he was doing until he looked back the way he had come.

That smiled sigh again, followed by a tickle at the back of his throat. He couldn’t clear or cough it away. Must be the mist again, the clouds that prefered the ground to the sky, the very ones that turned the forest beyond into a hazy memory.

He decided he was close enough for whatever he was supposed to see, a dozen paces or so from the trunks. The space between the trees had been deceptive during his approach. They had created an overlap, which made the trees appear much closer to each other. But they stood a good distance apart, one in front of the other, the shorter one leaning across that distance with branches outstretched.

The area at the base of the trunk did indeed look comfortable, and now would be as good time as any to remove that pebble from his boot. He slipped it off but found nothing. He looked at the trees above. The branches looked even more barren. No fruit. No sap. No answers.

He put his boot back on and tested his weight. Still the bite of that damn pebble. He stripped his foot bare. It looked so pale in the sunless sky. There, on the ball of his foot, just below his big toe was a series of holes, so deep they looked black even in the daylight. His fingertips hesitated over over them, and he half expected something to come out, wondering where the darkness had gone. Even more surprising than the discovery was the realization that he wasn’t surprised. He’d never had these holes before, but they were as plain and ordinary as a toenail, not even a blister or wart. He had the desire to take the other boot and sock off, to feel this smooth path on his bare feet, so that’s what he did.

He traced the bark of the nearest tree, the smaller one, peeked into its many knots for the answers they’d said he’d find. Finding nothing at all but wood and moss, he moved to a nearby spot to feel the grass on his feet. It fanned between his toes, and he held on to it. The grass and earth had soothed his pain.

He stretched, wiggling his fingers as if conducting the birds’ flight above. Fine droplets spattered his eyes, making everything prismatic. He went to wipe them but couldn’t. His hands. He felt his connection to them, but was unable to command them. His arms, too. Shoulders, elbows, wrists. All of them were locked. Mentally moving down his body, he found the rest of his joints were the same. His neck allowed him one more turn, and that was to look at the two trees behind him, which appeared to have slightly changed their configurations. The branches of both reached toward him, lower than he had remember them being, and his own arms reached back.

His eyes, thankfully without joints, frantically scanned where they could for the answer they had all promised him, his false mothers and fathers, who he would curse their name if he had been able.

Then he saw it, from a swollen knot on the smaller tree, something as pale as his foot. It spilled from that hole to the earth, with toes of its own, fingers of its own, eyes of its own, a voice of its own, and very alive.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 36 | Far Side of the Moon

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This week’s artwork gave me a good excuse to revisit the soundtrack for the film Moon by Clint Mansell. He’s one of my favorite composers and one who has such a unique sound. Some of the best melodies in the business along with creative use of instruments that aren’t typically featured in film soundtracks. That music coupled with my love for space horror made this one a fun one to write. I have some regrets, as one always does when attempting to crank out a story with no outline, but that is part of the process.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Morten Solgaard Pedersen

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kD8JvK

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Torres didn’t truly know what darkness was until he saw the far side of the moon. No words could describe it, so dark his eyes fabricated light of their own, in converging and diverging threads that only reminded him of the cover of his high school geometry book.

“Man, should have skipped the space burrito.” Bell’s mono crackle was insect legs in Torres’s ear canal. He groaned. “Get anything yet?”

Torres checked the readout, appreciative of the real light on the screen. Not a blip. When he looked back up into the darkness, the readout square imprinted itself with every blink. “Nothing.”

“Murphy?” Bell asked.

Heavy mouth breathing was the only response.

“It’s been, what, ten minutes?” Bell said. “Can’t be far.”

Torres flipped the sensor box around to use it as a flashlight. The image of the screen burned onto his retina was brighter, so he packed it away on his hip where he’d feel a vibration if anything was detected.

Underwater was the closest thing Torres could compare it to, the soundlessness here. Besides the steady white noise of the open line in his helmet, all he could hear was his heartbeat. Midnight swimming alone had been something like this. Sitting at the bottom. The pressure. Imagining the vacuum of space.

Sweat trailing down his arm was torture. How he wished for Earth gravity, at least then it might not settle in the crook of his arm for an eternity to itch and itch and itch.

Nothing was the closest thing Torres could compare any of this to. The feelings and images of a world that was a world away only made it all the more unbearable.

He shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be here. But Simmons. He should be here, so they wouldn’t have to be out here looking for him.

The sensor vibrated. Torres checked the dim screen, smacked it, which jostled the readout back to life. Three dots. Two ahead, one behind.

Had Bell fallen back? “Bell? I found him,” Torres said. “I’ll wait for you to catch up.”

“Catch up? I’m ahead with Murphy. Give me the coordinates.”

Torres stopped, setting his body into a position where his suit didn’t touch him, that middle zone that had been a game with him on the long days out here, scouting sectors. He’d stand that way for minutes, his record being five. Now he did this for an entirely different reason. To be invisible to whoever or whatever was beside him.

A static hiss found him. Boo, it said. “Torres?” it said.

Torres’s helmet took his head to his chest, oxygen hose reminding him he couldn’t escape.

“Simmons,” he said. “Where the hell? Doesn’t matter.” Torres transferred to group comms and spoke. “Bell, Murphy, we’re–“

A shove sent Torres to the ground, colliding with a rock, then rolling down it, face first to the ground. To his left, he saw the readout’s glow, half-buried and flickering. Unable to orient himself, he reverse snow-angeled hoping the coverage would allow him to find it, but then what?

A hand picked it up, then the light was gone. That blackness again, except for the complex geometry tattooed on his eyes, every movement the scratch of an Etch-A-Sketch, scribbling out what little he had.

A touch to his arm, movement up the back of his helmet. He held his breath on instinct, waiting for the hose to be pulled free, the vacuum of space to be nothing like the bottom of a pool.

Then tapping. Gentle. Steady. A pattern.

B-E-L-L-I-N-F-E-C-T-E-D.

Infected? “Simmons–” Another hit to his helmet. Torres switched to Simmons’s comm. Simmons’s breath was clipped, words struggling to fight their way between them.

“Simmons. Relax. We’re good.”

“We’re–” Breath. Breath. Breath. “Not.”

Group comms beeped.

Torres climbed to his feet, orienting himself with Simmons’s help. “Let’s get back to base and–“

Beep-beep-beep.

“Fuck.” Torres switched to group comms. “Yeah?”

It was Bell. “What the hell are you doing? Thought we lost you. Give me the damn coordinates already.”

The readout flashed brighter than Torres though possible, and in that flash, he saw Simmons’s face, drenched in sweat, aged, eyes bloodshot and pupiless, his head vigrously shaking no, no, no, no . . . .

He was tapping Morse Code again, on Torres’s visor, dead center. I-N-F-E-C-T-E-D.

“Torres, you have one fucking second to–” His voice was cut off by a half-scream, then liquid static.

Simmons’s suit went off like a Christmas tree, every light more frantic than the code he’d tapped to Torres. Then his own suit ignited, interior lights reflecting off the inside of his visor, showing him his own twisted face.

Then it was as if the sun soared behind them, white hot, their shadows stretching across the barren landscape, marred by stone and crater, reaching toward what could only be Murphy, who ran toward one of those craters, above which floated what could only be Bell.

Torres wished he were at the bottom of a pool, back home, decades ago, millions of miles away from the sight before him.

The group comms exploded inside his helmet with electronic screeching, but between the synthetic reproductions, he heard a man begging for life, then death, as he most certainly saw it tearing from his chest, in a geyser of threads, which sought out Murphy and pulled him into the pit.

All of this was displayed in the pure brilliance of the Rescue Beacon, surely documenting the horror for home to see long after they were all dead.

Torres grabbed Simmons’s arm, but he was locked as if a photograph, hand reaching as Murphy’s had been, the snapshot of his future.

Torres ran away from it all, into the light, waiting for his feet to find a stone to send him face down again, but this time, everything illumiated completely so he wouldn’t miss a thing, taken to whatever hell awaited him, because no matter how long he stared at the white light, running toward it, through it, he only saw complete darkness.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 35 | Nameless Creature

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I’ve been wanting to write a Lovecraftian short story for some time, but had yet to find just the right artwork. Most were either based on an existing story or too on the nose for my tastes. This one, however, was perfect. Unique in so many ways, yet fitting into the mythos so well. I had to find out what the story was.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Tatyana Kupriyanova

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ykPZER

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

She had a name once. The sky wouldn’t tell her. Textureless, it hovered above the sea with apathy. The sea wouldn’t tell her. Full of texture, it frothed unintelligibly in a language she had yet to learn. The birds wouldn’t tell her, for they frolicked both in air and water, allied with both.

The dock stood silent in decay, when it should have been bellowing its misery, for it had become a carcass. An old scab, picked at until even the wound it protected bled no more.

She moved across the gray sand, because walking would be a lie. She supposed there was another word for it, but she had still to attribute herself to such things.

The birds avoided her, as they should. The water, too. Inching closer to it, she tested its sentience. Sheets of it, clothed in foam, retreated no matter how she configured herself. So many configurations. She hadn’t counted, had been sickened by it, even looking at it. Them. They slithered, squirmed, writhed. All hideous words that brought bile to her throat. Metaphorically, of course. The disgust was a remnant of what she used to be. Who she used to be. Or was she still her? In some regard, she was.

Thoughts could become tangible. She would make them so. If she could become this, then anything was possible. These thoughts drew her closer to the dock, where something waited, something tangible.

The birds and water watched her, the sky. Their many eyes on her back were itches she couldn’t reach. Content to observe her agony in their squawks and crashes and gales. How could they keep it from her? After the nibbles of bread, the billow of her hair, the cut of her thighs?

She stopped, mere strides from the dock, remembering what strides were. She looked down, feeling the sand between her toes, how it molded to her arched foot, sinking at the heel and ball. A swirl of black looked back at her, moving of its own accord, an entity both separate and one with her. Her throat burned with acid, but she swallowed air.

She found the wave’s mist avoided her as well, and, in doing so, revealed a barnacled rope, tied to the dock, severed by the sea. Thousands upon thousands of bites, weathering it away, fiber by fiber, two severed ends slaves to the whims of the current.

Severed. As she had been, then regrown. Again and again. Multitudes. Enslaved. As she had been, then given agency. Or perhaps it was all an illusion, and she was part of the colorless symphony, merely lighter and darker shades.

The rope ends tapered as the water coursed over them, through them. Her scalp chilled. A spray of water, the wind spreading it over her scalp in icy fingers. She touched it. The flesh cold, the skull soft beneath. Except for lines, scars, disturbances. She removed her hand and wiped it on her gown, one that flowed like . . . she couldn’t think it.

Atop the dock now, the sea finally spoke. It told her of a man. Not a lover or friend. A caretaker. Footprints it couldn’t wash away, a hull it couldn’t shatter. Tied to a dock it couldn’t splinter. And when it wasn’t, it was master of that sea, cutting through it like a knife, using it against itself. It would go as far as it wished. Perhaps to the other side of the world. To another world, where there was no color, just shades, from white to black. Where promises might be found. Gifts.

She felt a weight on her arm. That weight settled at her wrist, heavy. It tugged her down, drawn by a force stronger than her, but not stronger than what she had become. She lifted it. Regarded it with eyes that both knew and didn’t know.

It hummed with life, sent ripples over her skin as if water. It told her of a girl on a beach who liked to watch the water, to dance in the waves, to sing to the wind. A girl who enjoyed the stormy skies and the chaos they brought, because that chaos drove everyone else from the shore, and she could be alone to bask in its power. A power given to it by the stars, unseen but there, in a sea far bigger than this one, in a place and time far more ancient. One that beckoned her with many many arms full of many many gifts. Promises.

She said yes, had said yes, and the stars had answered with everything she had never wanted.

She threw her arm to be rid of it, but her hand was too wide. She pulled, skin sliding, tearing, until she could take it no more. There, she cried. Tears were a memory, but remember, memories were tangible. Could be. But not today, so the memory was all she had. At least she could still close her eyes.

When that darkness reminded her too much of the night sky that had brought all the pain with the gift that bound her, she opened her eyes. A bird, dark of feather and long of beak perched on a dock post, cocked its head. She opened her mouth to speak to it, but only water came. She would have given it crumbs, if she had any, but her arm was shackled, behind her back because she couldn’t look at it, held there by her other in case the stars chose to utter their false promises.

She let the wind take her gown, flutter it about her chest. A useless artifact from a time she wished she could make whole. Free of it, she left the dock, the severed ropes, the beach. The waves did not shun her. They welcomed her as the stars had once, as they still do now, fallen, anchored to her wrist, to usher her to a place as deep and as black as the place where she had left her name.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 34 | Gift

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Another departure from the fantastic, mostly. It is vaguely set in the future and explores a woman approaching her twilight. How small things we hold on to affect our final days.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Swang

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8egg3R

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

The building was white and flat and clean, and Grace hated it. But it was home now. It was bad luck to hate your home before you entered it. Someone must have said that once. The sight of it even made the box in her arms heavier, though it was only full of flowers.

“The first step is the worst step,” Grace said, her sunglasses doing nothing to block the bleached concrete.

Cole weaved in front of her, without rubbing against her leg, sat, yellow eyes boring through her. He never looked at her.

“I know,” she said.

“Well isn’t he a darling–or she, my instinct in that regard faded ever since Maeve was born. What do you call that magnificient feline?” A woman shuffled onto the synthetic grass with a miniature parasol shading her swoop of a nose.

“Cole,” Grace said.

“So cute. You must have been a bad girl. Coal and a box of dead flowers for Christmas.” The woman’s face pinched into a cone. “Let me take care of those for you.”

Grace looked into the box of wilted lack of color. The ride hadn’t been long. Had it? The heat on the bus, her seat in direct sunlight, because no one respected their elders anymore.

Grace shook her head, disagreeing with herself about the first step being the worst as she made her way inside.

The walls were white and flat and clean. She cried, surrounded by a lack of color.

Cole glided his way to the window, hopped onto the sill and did as cats do.

“You don’t care, do you?” Grace said.

Cole looked at her. He never looked at her.

Grace made the best of things in the place where she would die. The flowers were an sign. And this apartment was the size of a tomb.

The next day, Cole was gone. The last thing to lose. She’d told him she couldn’t live without him, and that’s why she specifically bought him when she had. He hadn’t seemed to listen.

Grace went to the patio with two pairs of sunglasses to fend off the morning. A little warmer out there, but no furniture, so she had to stand. Touching the antiseptic building was the last thing she wanted to do, but her rickety legs never gave her much of what she wanted anymore.

She took comfort in the less-ugly horizon, with its highs and lows, much like her garden. No matter how much she planned the planting of those flowers, the rascals never seemed to harmonize. A painful memory, trapped in a tomb without a grain of soil for miles. A dog walked by on the sidewalk below, considered the synthetic grass, then decided it wasn’t good enough for his urine.

Grace snorted a laugh, which brought more tears than joy. Sweat gluing her arms to her sides, and her thighs feeling like a battlefield, she returned inside. There, in a patch of four squares of light, was Cole, an orange flower in his mouth.

“Where’d you get that?” she said. Her heart fluttered like the butterflies in her garden.

Cole didn’t answer, just dropped it at his feet like a dead mouse. Her cane was no good, just pushing it around, so she braved squatting. A chair for support would have been a good idea, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, as if she had ever known what that looked like. On her back, body a sea of spasms, the ceiling was an unfocusable nothing. If there had only been something to concentrate on, maybe it would have dulled the pain.

The flower’s scent made it to her. She closed her eyes and used that. Time was meaningless, but she supposed it had been hours. Hours were what she needed.

The flower kept the pain at bay. She couldn’t reach it, but she pretended she could, delicately gripping the stem before give it a respectful sniff. Then Cole snatched it away and pranced to somewhere she couldn’t see. She rattled off all the curses she’d bottled since the swear jar that she fucking got rid of first before coming to this cell.

Sometimes anger was what you needed. The thought came to her as she got to her feet, hunched like an invalid, which she was. She limped to the door, where Cole continued to taunt her, holding the flower all wrong. Two of the petals were missing already. How could he do this to her?

The door opened by a sensor, with a hiss, and Cole darted outside. She gave an encore of curses to the stupid, dead, robotic room, and hauled her flesh fire after him.

The path to the road was hot coals. The kind the lady thought her worthless cat was named after. Cole had dropped the flower as he crossed the street, just in time for a car to flatten it before she got there. Someone shouted behind her. She didn’t care.

At least she had remembered her cane. Her mind may be going, but she still had that. The cane propelled her after Cole, and she hoped it was picking up all kind of filth, because she would bop him on the head with it when she finally caught him. She tracked him to a tunnel, which she entered with fervor, this dead place finally have some use.

After an eternity of darkness, she was reborn again into light, and felt like screaming like a newborn. Doubly so when she saw Cole in a slant of light, the back of his head to her, like back home.

She followed his gaze up to a wall, not lacking color at all, arcing like a crashing wave. She separated from her body, the planet-size pain left behind in another solar system.

The flowers grew with enough irregularity to make her smile, to make her cry.

“Thank you,” she said to Cole.

Cole flicked a ear, his back to her, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.