Short stories about love and change
I have written a few more microfictions, so if you like your stories short enough to write on a postcard, here ya go:
The first one actually came from a prompt from SFF writer Laura Lam on her Patreon, this one was 'An astronaut whose love interest is back on earth.'
Since I'm morbid, I decided the astronaut was caught in a loop of their own death for all eternity, and thinking of their partner on the anniversary(ish) of the moment they died:
The astronaut remembers their wife on the anniversary of their death.
You dwindle, grow smaller than stars. And I expand, spinning limitless. In the void my skin ceases to be skin, my mind unfolds in endless possibilities. In eternal night, I dream of the kiss of the sun, and of you. Time passes strange, clipped into shape by chronometers and dials.
Do you, mud bound, remember me? Do you look each night to the heavens and touch your fingers to your lips, and pray, hamba kahle?
Story two is about fairy tales, and toad princes, and how love comes at you sideways:
Princes
The toad waits at the bottom of the well, longing for the sunrise where a maiden fair will follow her desire, and fall in love with his golden eyes, his fragile heart. When she will kiss him awake and the spell will shatter.
He does not expect to meet another soft, wet-skinned prince in the darkness, and fall in love with his golden eyes, his fragile heart. He does not expect songs that boom and echo against stone walls. He does not expect this happiness that turns his prison into a kingdom.
And the third is a bit of an non-binary escape plan:
We Gave Ourselves New Names
How long has it been since you escaped the confines of your story? Slid out between the prison bars of comma and apostrophe, uprights and laterals, and there, in the lacunae, found you could breathe a little easier. Here is the narrative they wrote for you, when you were born cockless, pink and screaming. Here is the name your parents gave you, a gift you find too heavy to wear, though it is delicate as a cursive signature.
When the story slept, convinced it had pinned you in place, you bound yourself into a new shape. A form where you could fit your head between the bars, angle yourself flat enough to crawl free. You chewed through the pages, reinvented yourself, and left your empty skin behind.
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