Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

Written for the prompt from this post at wordsinthebrain.

( Water cascades from his hair and skin and clothing, pooling on the wood until it leaks between the slats or runs over the side. She brings the blanket every time, but stopped trying to dry or warm him years ago. He will never be dry or warm. )

---

This also fills the Unwanted Transformation square of my hc_bingo card.

I would like to say that my next story will be happier, but it's me so I can't. But I certainly appreciate anyone who's brave enough to read it anyway. ♥

I had a bunch of stuff to say about this one, which naturally I've completely forgotten. The title is of course a pun on that famous song by Culture Club. I was trying to explain my idea for the bingo square fill to my awesome sis squeakyoflight and we started singing:

Coma, coma, coma, coma chameleon,
Zero Glasgow! Zero Glasgow!

Yeah, I have no idea either.

Anyway, the fic! I'm not sure where this should go in the timeline exactly, so right now I'll just put it as the most recent. This is a list of all the Pape and Danforth vignettes, more-or-less in chronological order:

Side Effects May Include Sleep Problems
The Girl in the Kitten Toque
Boots or Hearts
The Old Man at the Window
The Nesquick and the Dead
The Old Lady and her Dog
Stealing Costs Everybody
Pape and Danforth

Title: Coma Chameleon
Length: 2,658 Words
Rating: R (for language and description of violance)
Warnings: None
HC_Bingo Square: Coma (Bingo card is here.)

Summary: "You're the one making it up," Mike said completely seriously. "You probably have brain-damage." He didn't even look like he was enjoying himself, just delivering grim information.

( Charles woke up because Mike was kicking him )

Hi, guys! Happy Friday! I post bearing more original fiction.

Specifically, another vignette in my Pape and Danforth series. Remember them? No? Why am I not surprised? ::g::

Here is the most recent master list of all the stories, listed in order with the first story in the narrative (more or less) at the bottom:

The Girl in the Kitten Toque
Boots or Hearts
The Old Man at the Window
The Nesquick and the Dead
The Old Lady and her Dog
Stealing Costs Everybody
Pape and Danforth

Title: Side Effects May Include Sleep Problems
Length: 1,912 Words
Rating: PG-13 (for language)
Warnings: Mention of recreational drug use
HC_Bingo Square: Exhaustion (Bingo card is here.)

Summary: Charles shook his head. "It's nothing," he croaked. "I just…" I need proof that you're alive, but he couldn't say that. He reached for him instead, because the one true difference between real people and dead people was that if someone was dead you couldn't touch them.

Kind of Long Author's Note: I have to say I'm a bit disappointed that I wasn't able to come up with anything less directly related to the prompt. I generally like being more subtle. But on the other hand this is a pretty unsubtle series anyway, so hopefully it fits. :)

I also didn't intend for the whole thing to be such a Public Service Announcement. As of this addition, I've written about the evils of stealing, smoking, neglectful parenting, and now drugs. Next I'll probably write something about the importance of wearing a seat belt. All I can say is that I'm sorry and I'm really not proselytizing; It just kind of happened.

( The door banged open a second later and Josh crashed into the apartment. )

(The icon's picture has nothing to do with the story. I'm using it because my name for it is 'this will end badly', which is surprisingly appropriate.)

The theme this week was "Happiness in a Bottle". I went with the very mordant comedy sketch, which you can see here. I admire how Bill Cosby can be so gentle about something while still portraying it in all its pathos and horror.

This story is a sequel to Only the Skin. It's a little over 2000 words. I hope you enjoy it. :)

(Another brigits_flame link, which I mostly put in for easy access.)

( The wolves were howling again. )

The theme for this round was, "Once More, With Feeling".

I was looking over my older stuff this afternoon, because sometimes I procrastinate that way since it makes me feel vaguely productive, and I came across a story I'd originally written in 1997. I realized while I was reading it that it fit the theme really well--or at least the repetition aspect of 'once more with feeling', which was how I had been planning on interpreting the theme anyway.

I ended up taking out an entire dream/fantasy sequence thing that I was sure worked brilliantly when I was (Christ, how old was I in 1997? twenty-five, yeah. Though come to think of it I'm sure I actually wrote that when I was twenty, because I was at McMaster and not the University of Toronto).

So, I thought the dream sequence thing worked brilliantly when I was twenty, but realized when I was reading it again that it actually comes out of nowhere for an unfortunate WTF? aspect. So I aced it, which might not make the story any more clear or less opaquely subtle (hey, I was young, at university and living in Canada at that point; I doubt my stuff could have been more Canadian unless I was writing autobiographical pieces about a world war).

Anyway, this I suppose is as good a place as any to admit that I've been more-or-less obsessed with (fictional! metaphorical!) drowning since I was twenty, at least. This might actually be the first example of that. As far as I'm concerned the title relates directly to the story, but then again I'm an opaquely subtle Canadian. It might just be confusing as hell.

And here is the obligatory link to brigits_flame.

( It's been dark for hours, she has better things to do. )

So. Um.

Okay, I am horribly embarrassed by this. I mean, it is crack. Crack, I tell you. Crack-in-progress, even. The kind of thing that will make certain people on my FList who know me and my proclivities roll their eyes and smirk knowingly. (Oh, don't even pretend you're not doing it.)

And yet I am still posting it! Masochism, you ask? Well, um, maybe. But really it's because the prompt this week was "Flat", which made me think of this post by villainny, who is just awesome.

Doesn't it look like the poor snowperson was shoved out of an airplane? It does, doesn't it? Go look again.

And that got me thinking of, um, other people things that might fall out of the sky. Yeah. And then this idea kind of grabbed me by the throat and shook me until my teeth rattled. I think they're still rattling. Or that could just be my brain.

Anyway, for those of you who have actually read this far, this is set in my Gills 'verse (scroll down for the fiction entries). Some of the aspects of this might not jibe with the two earlier pieces, but that's because I'm still working out the details.

And now I'll shut up.

Edit: I forgot the link to brigits_flame. Here it is.

( Whoever designed you did a fantastic job )

The theme this week was 'Chaos'. The title comes from a song of the same name by The Tragically Hip, one of the greatest Canadian bands to ever grace my homeland. It also has a lyric I've wanted to use as an epigraph for about four years, but have never ever managed it. This isn't that lyric, because the Universe delights in mocking me. It's a different one.

I realized while I was writing this that I've got characters crying two weeks in a row. I feel another unintended theme coming on. Go, me.

When it starts
To fall apart
It really falls apart
Like boots or hearts
When they start
They really fall apart

(Here is an obligatory link to brigits_flame.)

( Joshua frowned. 'It's not like I fight every time I go out.' )

Since the prompt for this one was, 'It's quiet now', I wasn't thinking about music particularly, until out of the blue I remembered Song for a Winter's Night by Gordon Lightfoot. You can download it if you like, and I hope you will, because it's beautiful and heartbreaking and can still make me cry sometimes, even after nearly thirty years.

Anyway, here's something short and Hallowe'eny. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it.

( He didn't know what had woken him now, since the apartment was dark and quiet )

The title made me laaaaaugh.... Ah, I am such a goof.

Anyway, the prompt up at brigits_flame this week was "Fuel". What sprung to mind first was Steam by Peter Gabriel (gotta love those 80s graphics).

Give me steam
And how you feel can make it real
Real as anything you've seen

Anyway, I didn't use that.

I wanted to write something with robots--I love robots, hapless, eager-to-please, misunderstood AIs--but after walking on glass for the first lousy 317 words, I realized it just wasn't happening. (One of these days I will actually mange to write a vignette with a robot in it, I swear.) But, to me fuel has always been food, among other things, so I ended up doing something with that.

This is a continuation of my Pape and Danforth storyline. I'm not quite as proud of it as I was of the original, but I do think it's funny.

And here it is. Thank you all, as usual, for reading. :)

( Yeah, yeah, I get it. I'm the fucking wind beneath your wings. )

I can't believe I made it this far. Thank you again, everyone. The fact that you like my stuff enough to vote for it has once again made me very, very happy. :D

This was written for the prompt, "Amber". It's a sequel to "Beautiful", and yet another time I surprised myself with what I wrote. I'd been planning to write something about robots.

Inspiration, it seems, is an odd and fickle thing.

I'm also pleased to announce that I'm now 4/4 on guys bleeding. This is the kind of thing that amuses me.

I would like to thank everyone who chooses to read this very much. And once again, I hope you enjoy it.

mermaidbia: this one's for you. And also with much love to my sister, for her rough- and final-draft edits. This would have sucked without her.

(  Yeah, I think it's worse.  )