This is cloudscudding's creative journal ( Read more... )

At first, seeing the faces of screaming people in his shadow disturbed him greatly. He understood quickly enough that it was not because of anything he did, but walking through a darkened tunnel at night only to have somebody to flash onto the wall beside him, screaming silently as a car drove past, was sufficiently disturbing that he started ( Read more... )

The green man moved into the city slowly, not sure how or if he'd be able to find a home. He shifted himself thin through weeds that grew up in the cracks of the sidewalks, and he spread himself in great leaps across the trees that dotted the streets. He scowled at a highway and a bridge with nothing living on it, but the green dash of graffiti ( Read more... )

I wrapped our love tight in an entire roll of tin foil, shiny side out, hoping that would be enough to protect it, and I shoved it in the oven. The oven is meant to keep heat in, so it should work almost as well to keep heat out, right? It was the only guess I had, and I felt the heat rising in my heart as a shift in the narrative approached. It ( Read more... )

Whenever I had trouble trying to sleep, when the sound of the waves alone failed to lull me to sleep, I would leave my bed and walk down to the bluffs where the wind-whistlers sat. I don't know who they were--or are, I suppose--because the ceramic whistling masks they wore covered their faces entirely. Even their ability to see was navigated by ( Read more... )

Flames devour the clouds, while we stare in open horror. I do not know if there will be any more rainbows during my lifetime, because I do not know if there will be any more rain. I heard a rumor that some corporation signed a deal that was read to grant the cloud herders the right to do this, to vaporize our clouds and chase the vapors into their ( Read more... )

The no-parking signs no longer stood sentinel against cars. With the incoming tide and the rising of the water level up to a good three feet in the former parking lot, they had become anchor points for people to tie their canoes up against. It was one of the benefits of living in a former city, everybody agreed--the sheer prevalence of signs for ( Read more... )

He hissed his breath out slowly between his teeth as he felt the snake venom enter his veins. He'd hoped to never be at this point again, but he must have expected it or he wouldn't have been carrying around a syringe of snake venom just in case. Sometimes, the only remedy for a poison was another poison. He had truly (truly, he told himself) ( Read more... )

We're all stars now, or at least that’s what the advertisements say. The gear and hookups are free, and after that it's just a matter of waiting to see if any credits flow in while you carry on with your ordinary life. That's how it's pitched. In reality, 9/10ths of the kind of people who sign up for the hookups have their own plan of how to make ( Read more... )

The waves were choppy that morning as she pushed the boat off from the pier and settled down to row to the altar center, or what they thought was the altar center. Eventually, the buoy from the last successful sacrifice always disintegrated or floated away or fell apart, but that was part of the way it worked. Nobody would put extra buoys out ( Read more... )