The Un-named Tale, Part One

"I don't believe you." The look of skepticism was plain as peaches on Lyna's face. Her younger brother was making up stories all the time, and there was no reason to start believing him now.

"I'm telling you, I saw it! By the brook! In the bushes!" Raimy had a tendency to shout when he was excited. "Come and look! The tracks will still be there. It's not like you're doing anything important with your time. You're a girl!"

"Girls have important things to do too, you know." His eyebrows rose, clearly unconvinced. Apparently, cooking food and learning (or pretending to learn) how to tend house was not as important as pretending to hunt and getting into trouble. "Fine, I'll look. But if you're lying..."

Raimy stuck his tongue out. "I don't lie! You just don't see what I see, is all." This was a common line of his. He never lied to anyone. They just didn't see things the way he did, and that was their fault, not his. Turning on his heel, he started away from the back of their house.

It was a middling house in the middle of  Cullough, a middle sized town in the middle of the country of Penchram. Lyna often thought that she was always going to be stuck in the middle of everything, with no way out, but there was nothing wrong with her family's life, really. The house had two floors with a room for her parents and each of the children, a kitchen and a sitting room, and even a bath house in the back of the garden. Cullough even had a wooden wall around the outside, although if anyone ever thought to attack it they could just burn it down. That's what Raimy said he would do, as if he knew so much about attacking towns.

Out the gate Lyna followed her younger brother, watching his sandy head bob up and down the way it did when he was excited. He was the only one in their family with hair like that. Everyone else was dark, and on days like today, with the sun shining off it, she noticed it especially. "Not so fast! You'll trip in the ruts!" With an annoyed look over his shoulder at her, he slowed to keep pace. They were only two years apart, but sometimes it felt like decades. Twelve was so much more mature than ten. "Which brook was it? The north or south?"

"You know they only like the south! Come on!" He grabbed her arm and pulled her onto the main road, which was paved with round river stones, hurrying past all the shops and the South Gate Inn. They hurried left off the road and into the sparse forest. It seemed unusually quiet.

"Where are all the animals, Raimy? I don't like it. We should get father."

"No, we're here now and father is at the forge. Besides, you said you would come and look." He pulled her farther under the trees to where they could see the brook that ran just of the town and across the road. It's twin ran just outside the North Gate. "Look, just going into those bushes. See the slither marks?"

"That could be from anything. Someone dragging a big branch to the water."

"Then where are the footprints? And how come there are no broken branches?" He had a point, but she didn't like it. "Go look in the leaves. You'll see. It glints in the light, but be quiet."

Lyna froze. It glints in the light? They were supposed to be looking at tracks, not... "You mean it's still here? Are you mad? Everything we've ever been told about them says they're dangerous! I can't believe this! I'm going to..." That's when the bushes started to rustle and Lyna realized she had been shouting. Even Raimy's eyes had grown to the size of ripe apples. A huge, long shape was rising off of the ground, shafts of sunlight glinting on the jewels covering it's back.

Raimy had been right. There was a Ruby Snake by the South Brook, and it was staring right at them. What they didn't expect was for it to speak.

Sexually Transmitted Chocolate

My mind has been taking a really warped turn today. I was thinking about how much I love chocolate, and the old adage, "We always love the things that are bad for us," popped into my head. Chocolate, in itself, isn't bad for you. Sure, if I ate the amount of M&Ms I consume on a trip to Vegas or Ottawa on a regular basis I'm sure they would eventually be detrimental to my health, but I do try to metre my intake. I think the word "bad" has gotten a little blown out of proportion.

This is how I was thinking: Herpes is bad for me, and I definitely don't love it or ever want it. So is cancer, and I'm not going to send the cancer fairy a Christmas card. Maybe "blown out of proportion " is the wrong phrasing. Maybe it's just one of those things that has a lot of grey area. Eating a lot of fast food is bad. That's one end of the scale. Coming into contact with the flesh eating bacteria in a scummy pond while you have a scrape on your leg is also bad. That's the other end, and there are so many levels in the middle that it can seriously mess with you if you actually took the time to stop and think about it.

Why did I go off on this tangent this morning? I have no idea. Not many people would make the leap from eating too much chocolate to STIs (unless they happen to use chocolate in the bedroom a lot, which I don't.) However, in the future, I will definitely think twice (or more) before I eat candy off a stranger.

A Day of Dim Views

There are three hours of my life today that I can't remember. Not because I was asleep, or drunk, or stoned, but because I was knocked unconscious. My blood vessels contracted and cut off blood flow to the left side of my brain and that caused me to fall and hit my face on my coffee table. I don't know exactly what happened or I would tell you, but the smack to the face erased it from my mind.

Sure, I have a chronic illness, but I don't want your sympathy for it. I'm just frustrated, and I need to put it in writing. My brain loses blood, I lose the ability to speak and move the right side of my body, and I get helpless. Obviously, no one wants to feel that way. When it happens (and I'm awake for it) I get to lie on the floor and try to find a way to get to my phone with my good arm and call for help. Most people jokingly say that they can't live without their cell phones, but in my case it's a harsh reality. I used to have one of those medic alert buttons. You remember the commercials with the little old lady saying, "I've fallen and I can't get up." That was me, only I'm in my twenties and I felt like a fool having to wear a call button around my neck twenty-four hours a day.

At my age, dependency on anyone but myself is painful. Having to sit on the couch and watch my mother clean my house because I can't hurts me. Most people think something like that would be awesome, but when you have no other choice, when you have to be a burden on your family, it gets to be really hard. I can't really trust my body to do what it's supposed to. I don't think that I'll ever be able to live without prescription medications, and the thing that really gets me about the pills is that even though I swallow a handful of them twice a day it only makes things manageable, not better.

I know I'm not the only one living through something like this. I wish that I was, because it sucks. On the other hand, I wish I had someone who knew exactly what it was like that I could talk to. It feels like those are the two halves of me, left and right, always in opposition. The half that works and the half that doesn't. And, in spite of all my deep wells of frustration and flashes of hopelessness, I remain an optimist. This is the worst thing that's happened to me so far. Three hours of unintentional napping. I have survived falling down numerous flights of stairs, in the shower and bath tub, outside, in narrow hallways and holding boiling pots of liquid, and I've come through it all unscathed. There must be something that I'm doing right if this is the first major injury in all these years.

I will be here, attempting to write each day, sick or not, and I promise: I will try to keep it more sunshine than rain.

Where has all my potential gone?

Do you ever get the feeling that you've lost an important part of yourself? That happens to me every time I sit down at a key board or pick up a pen and paper. I used to be able to write like a fiend. The words would just flow from my brain to my fingers and people would be awed. Now, I get nothing.

The plan was to be the next great fantasy writer, and I can barely get out a decent blog entry. It's not drivel. It's readable. The spelling is good without having to use a spell checking program. The grammar is relatively easy to digest. It's just lacking a certain... wow factor. I don't think that I could walk into an English class and dance out with a 98% like I used to be able to do. That makes me sad. I've gone stagnant, kind of like that rain water that just ends up sitting in the ditch beside the highway. It was good water at one point, but as soon as it ended up at the side of the road, not so much.

My brain needs flexing. That's what it is. I just need to get on here, write my fingers raw and be the writer I know is in here. I need to be aware that some of it is going to be bad. There is a high probability that no one is going to read any of this, and that's okay. The important thing is to get the potential back to the surface. Potential doesn't dissipate, I don't think. You just forget you have it.