stillsostrange

I am in Connecticut with

matociquala. Eventually there will be pictures. But first, the first lines meme!

Kingdoms of Dust

In the dream he was home.

In the dream he was whole.

Dreams of Shreds & Tatters

Halloween night, and parties staggered down Granville Street--clubs full of costumes, sequins and feathers, masks and paint. People dressed in shiny new skins, searching for opportunities to shed them. Groping hands and sticky candy kisses, tricks and treats in darkened corners.

Mist & Chill

The Terminal is a dive on its best day.

Monster Garden

The bombs fell again the night the stranger came.

Pinion

Lilah runs and darkness follows.

Prayers to Broken Stone

Springtime in Paris, the cruelest month come and gone but storms still linger. Tonight rain washes the city, speeding the Seine in its rush to the sea. In the Left Bank, it pours from the gutters and drips from curling wrought iron balconies to splash against the cobbles below. Moisture darkens white walls, new paint and plaster over centuries-old bones. Pigeons sleep beneath the eaves, fat on café crumbs, violet-grey wings folded tight against the chill. And in her apartment on the rue du Dragon, Holly sits beside an open window and watches the rain.

Shadowhand

The stallion came with the dawn and the rising sun flung his shadow before him over the cracked and dusty ground.

The faerie book whose title will probably not be Brittle Glass Hearts, as much as I love a Glen Cook homage

The girl whose name was not Aletheia Rampion woke to thunder, and the surety that something was wrong.

(I'm not wedded to this--I had to scrape something together to get this into the meme.)

"Bone Garden"

They found the girl unconscious on the back doorstep an hour before dawn.

"Flood"

Nan doesn't mean to fall asleep--she never does. But Evie's soft breath and the steady creak of the ceiling fan lull her, till her eyes sag and the worn paperback slides from her fingers.

"Music From a Farther Room"

Alex found his wife waiting on the threshold, at the divide between memory and dream. He was used to finding her here, one of the many memory-ghosts to haunt these halls. But this was different. The door she stood in was one he couldn't cross.

"Red" (Hopefully this stays "Red" and not Red--we'll see.)

I wake with the taste of storms in my mouth and screams echoing down the hall. Slow and dream-sticky and for a second I don't know where I am, but I'm still on my feet with my gun in my hand before my eyes are all the way open.

"Serpentskirt"

All Souls Night and the gutters still brim with shed Hallows skin. Broken glass crunches under Jane's boots as she carries an amp to the van, glittering beside limp feathers and cracked sequins, tattered black and orange fliers. One hell of a party, she heard--Sixth Street is still subdued and sleepy. But even for the day after Halloween and a Monday to boot, the crowd is still better than last night's in Dallas.

"Snakebit"

The horses are restless.

"Spell 81A"

Someone had left flowers again.

"Waiting For the Train"

When it's raining here, you hear the trains. You hear them other times too, with the tracks so close, but the dusty heat of summer bakes the sound out of the air, till it gets buried under cars and trucks and TVs and voices and all the other small-town noises. But when the rain comes, and the trains come, the whistles carry all over, low and mournful and rumbling in my chest.

Untitled Blind Cave Mermaid Story

I wait in the mud and dark for the oracle to come.