pentacle 2

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

PART 1 – THREE OF SWORDS (cont.)

Stepping out into the street was like being hit with a bucket of ice water. It may have been April, but the seaside town of Columbia remained cold and damp well into June when the fair-weather tourists would begin to show their faces.

Adrian, with a detached sense of calm, realized that they were running on fumes. Eventually, they would crash and understand what had happened. Until then, they reasoned, they should continue to walk. It they stopped, they might forget how to do the locomotion-thing in the first place.

If the fog had any goddamn respect, it would have swirled, or done something majestic like that. But no. It hung cold and dead in the sky, daring Adrian to make it stop. The wind picked up and danced around Adrian, but the fog stubbornly stayed put.

Columbia was one street and if you blinked, or, if like Adrian, your eyes had stopped noticing anything in front of them, you could miss it. And miss it they did. They took a step forward into an unexpected substance.

“Oh,” Adrian said passively. Because they had just realized that they had stepped into the ocean. They might not have even removed their right foot from the ocean had they not heard a familiar call of “Yo Adrian!” followed by an obscene amount of laughter, from the lifeguard tower.

When Adrian reached the top of the ladder, Aiden was still laughing to himself.

“You know that kind of gets old,” Adrian said.

“Maybe to you,” Aiden shrugged. His demeanor turned a variation of serious. A half-smile still poked around his stoic expression. To Aiden, being fully serious meant you were loosing the battle against life’s slew of hardships. “So,” he started, “did you see him.” Adrian nodded.

“Yeah, he’s dead alright,” they repeated. It seemed to be the only thing they could say about their uncle.

“Was there any doubt?” Aiden asked. Adrian sat down and dangled their legs over the edge of the tower’s platform.

“I don’t know,” they replied. “He just never seemed like kind of guy who would -“

“Commit suicide?” Aiden finished.

“Die,” Adrian said. “It just didn’t seem like he could die.” Aiden nodded.

“You’re right. It did seem like he could live forever.” The two friends fell silent. The rhythmic sound of the waves washed over them. The seagulls screamed bloody murder and dove, in turns, to the ocean’s surface. Aiden joined Adrian on the edge of the platform. Tears threatened Adrian’s eyes, but they knew they would have to wait to fall. Aiden turned to talk to them again.

“What else do you have to do?” he asked.

“I have to talk to Joyce, er, his lawyer…will stuff. I think,” Adrian responded, uncertainly. Their stoic autopilot was beginning to falter. Aiden looked at his watch.

“Give me 15 minutes until my shift ends and I’ll go with you,” Aiden said.

“I’lll be fine on my own,” Adrian said. Aiden put his hand up to his ear.

“What’s that? What’s that?” He dropped his hand. “Yeah, I don’t care. I’m coming.”

there are monsters in small places 4

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

They call it Deadman’s Boulder because every year, someone winds up dead there. Usually, it’s a tourist who thinks they can swim against the undertow and stay away from the sharp sea rock. Every year, through the usual town lottery, someone finds their body, skin opened or back twisted and neck snapped.

There are a lot of ways these people find themselves snagged on Deadman’s Boulder and none of them have to do with the undertow. They are thrown from the ocean by the scaly sixty-foot sea snake that no one had ever photographed. They are thrown the other way by people who think the same snake could use a sacrifice. They are sunk by sirens who draw them in with slippery songs.

But every year, one person from Brightview has to call the town police, directly because it takes 911 three transfers to find a place called Brightview, and say, “Chief, there’s another one.”

there are monsters in small places 3

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

There is a boulder thick with moss along the beach that looks like one man leaning over another’s back. It’s an easy thing to climb if you are young and don’t mind scraping your knees the way Hazel doesn’t. She is already watching the ocean with the wind licking her neck – the way you can’t when you’re on the ground like Ray is – when Ezrah catches up to him.

“Want to go up, bud?” Ray shakes his head.

“No,” he says. But he watches Hazel with frustrated jealousy, scared to say that he’s scared of climbing up. Ros walks up slowly from behind.

“Really?” she asks, sounding surprised. “Because there are sirens up there. They’ll listen to you when you’re feeling sad.” Ray looks back up at Hazel on the top of the rock.
“Sirens? Really?”

Ros nods. The air of gravity she always keeps around her makes her easy for a kid to believe as Ray does now. He looks at Ros. She doesn’t make him ask her for help.

“Go on up. I’ll make sure you don’t fall.” Ray’s mouth parts in an uncertain smile, and he starts up the mossy foot of the first man. Ezrah tries to pierce Ros’s silence with his eyes.

“We used to think there were sirens up there,” he smiled.

“There are,” Ros answers. Her face remained sharp sea-broken rock.

there are monsters in small places 2

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

Rosmond was a quiet out-of-towner when Ezrah met her first four years ago. She smiled well on command, but she wouldn’t invite herself to talk to you and she would stop eating if she knew you were watching.

Ezrah thought she didn’t eat at all when his parents told him to come to lunch with the nice new family in town with a daughter your age, Ezrah. He watched her hand hovering over her fork to see if he could catch the butterfly wing movement of her picking it up, but she did not. She kept her head bent. Halfway through Ezrah’s grilled cheese, she could finally talk to him.

“Can you stop watching?” she said in a voice that only reached as far as Evander in the seat next to Ezrah. There was not a daughter four years older like Evander but Evander had to come to this stupid lunch anyway.

“Why don’t you just eat?” Evander snapped. Rosmond could not answer. She also could not eat. She still could not answer until Ezrah’s parents took them to see the lovely little boardwalk just outside of town. Evander stepped over the still water tide pools and stilled the waving anemone with the point of a stick.

“Why not just leave it alone,” she whispered, and only Ezrah heard her.

there are monsters in small places 1

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

“Come look at this, Hazel. It’s a sea monster,” Raymundo taunts. Hazel sticks out her chin.

“I know that’s not a sea monster. That’s a mamenomy,” she stumbles over the word. It waves its fingers at her, and in return she pokes its stomach to make it flinch away from her.

“Gotcha!” she grins. Ray grumbles and looks for something else to torment his sister with.

“Your cousins are pretty cute,“ Ezrah comments. Rosmond nods slowly and silently, but she does not speak. Ezrah surveys the boardwalk for an interesting conversation topic, but the small town of Brightview is a sleepy little thing, and he quickly grows restless.

“Why don’t we go play with them?” he asks, knowing Rosmond will not ignore a direct question.

“I shouldn’t get involved,” she says. Hazel and Ray move down the beach and Rosmond gets up to follow. Ezrah notices that she does not mention him in her response. She does not say that Ezrah should not leave her to play with her cousins, but he knows better than to leave her alone on the beach.

pentacle 1

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

PART 1 – THREE OF SWORDS

Adrian leaned casually on the funeral parlor’s overly decorative side table. Their backwards baseball cap sat at a slight angle and they were dressed perfectly casually, more appropriate for a baseball game than to make arrangements for their dead uncle’s funeral. But Adrian was alone. There was no one, no one there to tell them that they should dress nicer or show more respect, so Adrian was going to dress however they damn well pleased.

The undertaker motioned to Adrian with a stoic gesture of her head. Adrian sighed and followed her. Despite their casual attitude, they were dreading this moment. This unfortunate moment of finality.

Uncle Bahir had his own room. Which Adrian was sure he disliked greatly. He always craved attention and activity, and he was quick to laugh, a laugh that originated deep from his stomach.

Adrian quickly repositioned their baseball cap as a way to avoid their growing sentimentality. The undertaker lead them to the casket. Bahir was half uncovered by the two-part lid, as if tucked in for bed or something inane like that. He was done up, so to speak. The undertaker had worked her magic and Bahir looked better in death than he ever did in life. Though vivacious, he was prone to dark circles. Though he loved life, he also worked himself to the bone.

Adrian wondered if Bahir should have been shrouded in white, but they wouldn’t know what to say. They had been on a long-haul red-eye flight when funeral arrangements were put in to action. The shroud, even, was only something Adrian noticed in passing at the funeral of Uncle Bahir’s great aunt or third cousin or something like. Adrian only enjoyed in passing a connection with the muslim faith theoretically belonged to them.

The undertaker looked expectantly at Adrian. Adrian looked back at her.

“Yeah, he’s dead alright,” they said. The undertaker, a very professional undertaker, simply nodded and lead Adrian to her office to discuss the funeral details.

Was there ever, she reflected, a proper response to being shown the body of a loved one?

xavier 1

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

Xavier watched the new girl carefully. She was hiding something. That’s all he knew, but everybody who walked nervously though his door was hiding something, and his employer had made it clear that she had a secret, a secret that mysterious man wanted his hands on.

Xavier questioned this man’s motives, but who was he to refuse cold, hard cash? Not credits, real money. Real money that could buy real food and real clothes. Money that even a human couldn’t refuse. And all for one secret off this girl, this small, nervous girl who looked no older than sixteen.

The man had assured him that she was a 30, nothing he couldn’t handle, but she was hiding something, something that meant real money to a hooded figure with a raspy voice. Xavier smiled at the girl and stuck out his hand.

“Welcome, I’m Xavier.” The girl bit her lip and shook the offered hand.

“Elia.” He glanced at her report. Eris Athena, it said. This was the one. Her file was small and insignificant as she looked. An uneventful Sigma training and the early dismissal that so many unremarkable wizards received. He couldn’t say he was jealous.

Elia knew he wouldn’t be, but she didn’t care what he thought. Right now, she was
occupied with another thought: How would she hide who she really was? It was easy around humans. For all they knew, if you scored a 30 on the WAP, you were a 30, and that was that, but this kid was a wizard, a seer at that. Only Pi’s became seers. He would be powerful and would have no problem dealing with her tricks.