5 Stories
in 500 Words
Unamused
What they don’t tell you about being a muse is the graveyard shifts. Artists are insomniacs, the lot of them—and if some random playwright wants a touch of divine encouragement at 3 AM, they’ll plead and plead and plead until you drag your sorry robes out of bed and descend.
But you signed the paperwork—they won’t let you forget that. You tuned your chords and mixed your paints. You donned your masks and danced and gazed skyward. You leapt at your very first call—you, a true inspiration, a vision bedecked in brilliance, answering the prayers from on high!
And then you sat there for the next hour listening to some half-lucid Italian composer rambling about G minor as if you hadn’t played that chord since the dawn of music itself, until you want to lean in and whisper Hey, why don’t you go ahead and try to tell someone who didn’t invent the harp which of those is the C string—while you’re pointing to the F.
Mortals are full of words, so full they burst. When you arrive, they greet you with bright eager gazes, wide eyes like offering plates left beneath a full moon. It’s something about those eyes—those imperfect eyes, those human eyes—and that look they get like all the words are swelling somewhere just behind their corneas, building in that gasp they take when you alight upon their doorstep, no matter how groggy you look. They never mentioned that in the contract: that mortals don’t care that your hair is a mess, that your wrap is on backwards, that you’ve got ink on your forehead, that you forgot your flute. They don’t notice. Not when their words are already spilling and spilling and spilling out all over you.
When you finally return to the Olympus chambers, yawning and foggy-headed, Urania is slouched and snoring against her celestial sphere, Terpsichore sprawled on the couch with a half-drained bottle of nectar, Thalia dragging herself home from her sixty-fourth trip to Los Angeles, Melpomene glowering silently from the corner—though perhaps, as muse of tragedy, it’s an appropriate attitude towards her work. Immortality doesn’t grant you the dull validation of dark, baggy eyes or faces lined with exhaustion. But you see it anyway, behind the sullen sculpted brows and cupid’s-bow mouths curved in sour downward arcs, and any god who proclaims You should’ve known what you were signing up for will get a lyre to the head.
But the calls, the prayers—mortals are never quiet. You can smell the incense, the cigarettes, the cheap watered-down bourbon the young ones take to make themselves feel old. It stings your sinuses. It’s almost enough to turn you away. But you can feel those words rising from below, those anxious eyes searching for you in the heavens, entreating you, even needing you—even bedraggled and sore and disheveled as you are.
But maybe that’s why, you realize. Maybe that’s why mortals don’t listen. Maybe if they saw someone they should listen to, they’d know you as the voice, the face, that spawned epics, sagas, murals, operas, theses. So you wash the tangles from your locks, polish your brooches, tuck in your robes. You look at yourself in the mirror, and for a moment you almost think you see, in that polished bronze, the muse you were before. When you bore holy inspiration like a wreath of fire. When the ink of your name was still wet on the signature line. When you were someone worth needing.
Moontide
The island has no name; it is alone in the endless sea. Only the waves and the spirits of the deep wait beyond its windswept cliffs. Every adult knows this and says it. But children don’t listen.
No boat sails far. In the season of storms, many do not return. Those ships that make it, when they are old and beaten, are drawn up with ropes and affixed to the salty sandstone, draped in grayed canvas, and tied tight with castoff rigging, roosts for their captains. There they stay, bound to the island.
On the shores below, it is a blessing to find a mote of driftwood, a single bough from the pulsing waves. They are offerings from beyond, the youngest of the village say, and hide the twigs in pockets and under pillows. Adults shake their heads. It is but a lost ship of ours; its pieces return to us—there is nothing beyond the island. But children don’t listen.
When Moontide comes, the waves retreat from the Spine of the Sea, the stepping-stones of spirits. The elders say it is the night of witching: the deepfolk come out to dance beneath the low-hanging moon; the seal-riders and limpet-eyes, shellheads and crabfolk, and all mortals must stay inside or be carried to the deep, to the nothing beyond the sea.
But children don’t listen. They think too much, or too little. They slip through windows and down rigging, alight upon the Spine. And under the moon’s blind eye they throw their driftwood offerings back to sea.
Echo at the Opera
The opera opened when the streets were young, when the clop of horse-hooves filled my mouth, and the hiss of rail-steam parched my ears. I watched the stone arches rise, balancing the thunder of hammers and grumbles of moving metal on my tongue. They painted the domed theater ceiling with the dances of satyrs, laurel wreaths and lyres, the smirks of lounging gods. My face was not among them.
Soon the singers came, and I followed them. My feet left no mark on the lush red carpets. Voices filled the space behind the heavy velvet curtains with trills and quavers. I gazed at their smoothed features reflected in the changing room mirrors. Perhaps my face once had that sullen brow, that curving lip, that tumbling hair; I’ve long forgotten. Soft gaslight shone on painted temples, eyes darkened in heavy liner, pale cheeks made rosy with gentle puffs of cloth. Silk draperies curtained the windows of their bodies. Earrings large as fists. Wings of feathered wire. Horns of wood.
I lingered in the dark at first, whispering the reverberations of their voices. I flitted behind seats filled with onlookers hushed in rapture at the choir, the dance, the living kaleidoscope of actors swirling on the stage. They seemed so far away, from the dimness of the balconies, from the rope-strung catwalks. Like flowers blooming in the candlelight.
The theater creaked at night, as it settled into sleep, and when I finally dared venture onto stage in the black and empty opera, I could pretend the groans were from the missing weight of me upon the floorboards. I played make-believe there every night that followed; the painted ceiling was my audience, watching with acrylic eyes. Encore, they’d cry, as I bowed to their applause at the coda of a song. My lips traced each line and chorus; I strained to hear a whisper in return, a resonant note from the blackened eaves where in the day I hid, to know the theater held me like it held the voices of the singers onstage. But there never was an answer, only blank eyes above and empty seats beyond, and the rose petals of my fantasy withered in my hands.
The opera aged and stretched. Fresh bright paint graced the theater’s facades and faces, those watching from the ceiling, those in the backstage mirrors. The voices onstage swelled louder, bolder, swelled through hulking roof-bound speakers. The hum of electric bulbs replaced the silent smoke of candles, lights so brilliant I was sure they could illuminate anything. That they could see anything.
The darkness feels blacker now after the spotlights have gone, the stillness deeper without the bellow of amplifiers. The quiet, the dark—they press in until the theater walls seem to quake with a ringing that shudders and shivers through the space where my bones once were. I pace the stage beneath the gods above; once, I even tried to pray the night away. But I know that their painted eyes could never see through the black, nor those flat ears hear in the juddering silence. Only the flame of spotlights and the boom of voices can banish this dark.
So in the heat of the show and before the beaming crowd, I steal the stage. Even the prima donna only dances behind my leaps and twirls. I plunge my imaginary knife into imaginary chests in perfect rhythm with the play, scorn my fake daughters and trick my fake sons, treachery and witchery and misery, bold in the blaze of the spotlights. I am still a performer. Sometimes, when the lights flash bright overhead and each line rings clear and loud, I can almost believe it.
The Mantis Bride
Just days before the wedding, the bride’s stomach heard humming in the night. When she woke, she found a deep groove tucked into her torso, sternum to navel, like a long teardrop molded in flesh. When she traced her hands around its smooth edges, the shuff of flesh on flesh whispered in her abdominus. The clink of crystal glasses strummed along her tendons like quivers along harp strings. It felt heavy, almost, this new sensation. It prickled against the inside of her skin. When she mentioned the strange pressure, the full weight of it in the curve of her stomach, the groom snorted and dumped the rest of her wine over the railing.
In the morning there was a photoshoot. Dresses and flowers and lingerie. The bride thumbed through magazines in the lobby: twirling women framed by gowns white as teeth, smiling and smiling. In the changing room mirror she practiced her own, held up the glossy pinups to compare. Somehow the stretch of her lips didn’t look right beside them, hers more shoelaces than ribbons. The whine of the beauty lights overhead echoed through her abdomen, a soft purr, like an itch behind her stomach wall, like the drone of a bee bumping against the insides of a jar. She turned the magazine over to hide the glazed gazes before she undressed for the cameras. In the photo room, the groom told the photographers to go for the sultry look. Mouth shut. Lips turned down.
The photos returned the day after. The groom picked four. Here she hides behind a rose, there she gives a bouquet bedroom eyes. Here shrouded beneath her veil, there covering a topless breast. They’d erased the birthmark on her shoulder, the acne scar above her brow. Darkened her puckered closed-lipped frown. Saturated her downcast eyes. The rest of the gallery went in the trash. The crinkling of the paper buzzed through her gut and nipped at the edges of her ribs, a hornet deep inside her sternum—trapped.
When she awoke the next morning, she discovered her arms had pierced the pillow while she slept. Dark, slender spines sprouted from her forearms, from the tips of her fingers, wrapped seamlessly within her flesh, not quite bone—something smoother. Goose down stuffing drifted from each slim, pointed tip. She traced the strong, lean hooks and wondered how the new black would look against her gown, and how that gown would pleat and shuffle, enfolding her with wings and whispers of gauze, if it’d make a duet to the rising vibrations that thrummed across her torso with every brush against her spines. She asked the groom if he heard it too, the droning, that growing buzz. But he just scowled and left her to clean up.
Late on the night after their wedding, while the groom slept, the bride dressed herself in the mirror. He did not see the fabric rustles that filled the humming space behind her ribs. He did not see the soft points of spines slice the delicate gossamer of her sleeves. He slept in silence until her weight filled the bed beside him. And then all he saw was the dark gleam of new fangs nested in her smile.
Cat Herders, Inc.
At the start, Whitlock, Smith, and Markov all agreed that something must done about the cats. They were too disorganized, all mewling and caterwauling and making a terrible racket up and down the streets, waking sleepers and stealing milk, clawing fine carpets and pissing on doormats. It had gone on long enough. The funders approved; the stakeholders concurred. So the big three built a lab, a warehouse with filled crates that were in turn filled with hissing and yowling. They commissioned a wind tunnel and terrain courses, a psychological maze. They hired scientists and vets and publicists. It was time to organize and whip those scrappy tabbies and rowdy ragamuffins into shape.
What shape, however—that was a different matter. Whitlock maintained that an arrowhead formation was the way to go on account of aerodynamics; Smith favored circular and tight-packed, for ease of control; Markov insisted on an orderly line. The stakeholders preferred star-shaped, for the aesthetics; the marketing department argued for rectangular, the better to fit on an advertising page. The big three took it to the testing room: the wind tunnel just blasted and scattered their whining subjects, and soon the maze was full of dozing, contented felines unresponsive to the researchers’ prodding.
After the first round of tests four cats were missing. Whitlock blamed the scientists and the scientists blamed the vets and the vets blamed a cat burglar in the night. The following morning, the head of security arrived to find a hairball carefully and deliberately placed in the center of his desk chair cushion.
Then there was the problem of the promotional campaign and what to call it. Was it a “pack” of cats—Whitlock’s suggestion—or a “procession,” according to Markov? Or perhaps a “clowder,” as the vets and the dictionary asserted? Marketing pushed for a “mass” (Marshal the Mass: No More Cat Sass!), and science for a “sample.” The stakeholders maintained that “litter” was superior, despite the vets’ protests that such a thing could only refer to kittens. Amid the arguments a company billboard boasting a “glaring” of cats appeared beside the freeway—and chaos spewed across all departments. Smith, complaining of “irascible digestion” just before the uproar, was nowhere to be found that day.
By the end of the year, the fiscal graphs bore an impressive resemblance to the Cliffs of Moher. Layoffs began, then firings. The marketing department’s fragile “mickle” truce crumbled, and four employees left in handcuffs. The lead veterinary advisor’s license was revoked after a government inspection of the wind tunnel. The head of the science department wandered into the maze and never reappeared. Soon all that remained were the big three.
Markov was caught in the basement with the missing cats and a toy mouse on a string, then promptly fired under charges of feline rabble-rousing. She left nothing behind but a photo of Whitlock carrying a hairball to the security office.
Whitlock sued Markov for libel and promptly lost. He was removed from office and banned from company property. Shortly thereafter a dog was let loose in the cat containment area, sowing havoc among its occupants. The authorities were unable to identify the culprit.
Smith’s digestion issue never resolved itself. He was last seen reclining in the Bahamas under doctors’ orders.
They agreed, at least, that nothing must be done about the cats.