First, lemon balm and lavender for the bees. Their scents linger in the hidden corners of the garden with swirls of green and blue, colour filling the air like sun through stained glass. You try poppies next, and swathes of brilliant orange streak toward the sky. Apples blossom softly pink, radiant.
The garden grows what I’ve misplaced. A missing dollar bill becomes a strangely patterned leaf no one would take as legal tender. A runaway cat turns up again as a bundle of greenery with thorns for claws. Then my boyfriend dumps me. I go to the garden, still crying, & wait for what it will provide.
Fucking Ben the first owner's first husband ("the weird one," her brother confided) planted some goddamn shit in the yard and DIDN'T USE THE RIGHT WARDS ON THE PIPES
I HAVE GLOWING SPORES COMING OUT OF MY TOILET, BEN
The seeds -- huge, oval, gleaming and iridescent as the shell of abalone -- go into the ground the night before the big storm. I push them in deep, enjoying the cool earth.
They're slow growers; I knew that, of course. "These ain't no magic beans, missus," the old man warned me, chortling.
I've got a new story online now at @talesfeathers.bsky.social! After a couple of bleak and gruesome publications in a row from me, this one is the opposite, probably the sweetest thing I will ever write: a tender little sapphic love story set in a world where poetry is (literally) magic 🌳 🐸 ☀️ 🌊
You didn't know it was there when you bought the house. But when oddly twisting plants sprout and bear fruit in the shape of the forks dropped during the moving party and the earring lost one late night, you realize you have a Witch's Garden. What do you plant next?
#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt
An orange illustration of two glass bottles that hold magic liquids. There are two yellow stars at the top and one of the bottom left. At the top of the image reads: “The Trees and the Frogs and the Sun on the Water” M. R. Robinson” in white text. In the middle of the graphic, there is a quote from the story that reads: “Before Rosemarie fell in love, she filled every scrap of silence with a song. A harvest tune, sung over the thwick-thwack slap of dough against the countertop; fragments of a lullaby, the melody guiding her needle until even the embroidered birds seemed to sing along; or, sometimes, both parts of carol, call and response alike, pretending she wasn’t nearly so lonely.” in brown text. Underneath it reads: “Tales & Feathers Magazine — Volume 4” in white text. At the bottom is the link to the story: https://augursociety.org/the-trees-and-the-frogs-and-the-sun-on-the-water/
New T&F story is now FREE to read on our site!
“The Trees and the Frogs and the Sun on the Water” by @mruthrobinson.bsky.social is a tender tale of love, poetry, and misfired magic.🔥📖
Read it now! 🔗 Link in bio.
An orange illustration of two glass bottles that hold magic liquids. There are two yellow stars at the top and one of the bottom left. At the top of the image reads: “The Trees and the Frogs and the Sun on the Water” M. R. Robinson” in white text. In the middle of the graphic, there is a quote from the story that reads: “Before Rosemarie fell in love, she filled every scrap of silence with a song. A harvest tune, sung over the thwick-thwack slap of dough against the countertop; fragments of a lullaby, the melody guiding her needle until even the embroidered birds seemed to sing along; or, sometimes, both parts of carol, call and response alike, pretending she wasn’t nearly so lonely.” in brown text. Underneath it reads: “Tales & Feathers Magazine — Volume 4” in white text. At the bottom is the link to the story: https://augursociety.org/the-trees-and-the-frogs-and-the-sun-on-the-water/
New T&F story is now FREE to read on our site!
“The Trees and the Frogs and the Sun on the Water” by @mruthrobinson.bsky.social is a tender tale of love, poetry, and misfired magic.🔥📖
Read it now! 🔗 Link in bio.
This pod has been choreographing a dance for three lifetimes of a small sun. I hear them counting to each other in integers unfathomable to human cognition. The numbers sound like the background hum of what poets have been seeking for our brief centuries.
I strain my ears. The song is very faint, the machine barely picks it up. I isolate the sound, then amplify it as best I can without rendering it inaudible. This is it, the first starwhale song ever captured by human satellites! I rush to translate the fragment:
🎶Hungry. Want food. Where food.🎶
A gathering! A grouping! A growing!
A dance of doulas around a ready mother. A new life emerges into the glow of a golden sun, the protective pod prepared for predators.
A new voice, a larger chorus of love and grandeur and hope sings out across the stars as Life gains and the Sound rings out!
A young mother is reaching out to her own, with good news. The little one, barely a century old and still nursing, is shy; her song still too small to reach across many light-years. But with a little gentle encouragement from her mother, she manages a soft greeting to her deeply proud grandmother.
When the alarms ring out in the deep of the night, my crew, a dedicated mix of scholars, deep space biologists, writers, and a local(to our base) community college drama club, all snap to their positions. We've been waiting for this opportunity for almost a decade.
This pod is reenacting Moby Dick.
Starwhales may spend eons alone or in small pods on their endless migration through the seas between stars. But much like their tiny Earth kindred, their songs echo across lightyears, weaving tales and friendship across the cosmos. What thread do you overhear?
#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt
The tools of the trade. The tools of growth. Rake, shovel, trowel. Garden soil, mulch, seeds. Electric mower and watering can. Gloves, and hat, and pruning shears. What better to share than what's used to tend to the yard? We all are better when we turn dirt to life, to color and food and delight?
The Decentralized Library of Stuff allows anyone to offer any personal items they wish to be listed in the catalogue and borrowed by patrons, while ownership remains with the individual. What unique collection of yours have you chosen to share with the library?
#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt
Finally, in @talesfeathers.bsky.social, I enjoyed reading "I Will Bring You Tokyo" by @pscwillis.bsky.social.
I walked the woods, by the old railroad trail, when last I visited. Echoes of old engines, of metal wheels singing on metal rails, of the thump of the hammers that drove the spikes that held the rails to the ties rang in my ears. That was home, not the house I slept in, not the people who shared it.
Home hasn’t been home for many years, but the house is the same as it ever was: too small for all the people. My siblings are grown-up adults with their own lives and worries. We look each other in the eye and speak to the younger person we once knew, now wearing a stranger’s older face like a mask.
You wear the talismans of your heart like armour, trusting in them to keep you grounded:
-a long skirt embroidered with spiderwebs and daffodils, sewn in summer sun
-a small river stone pendant that whispers stories of movement and change
-the memory of a kiss, from the one who loves you as you are
Coming home is never easy. Like a distorted version of time travel, you find yourself reverting to the version of yourself that once lived here, yet the world refuses to shrink itself to match. Where do you find stability, in this visit, to hold on to who you are?
#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt
A green illustration of two glass bottles that hold magic liquids. There are two yellow stars at the top and one of the bottom left. At the top of the image reads: “I Will Bring You Tokyo” by P.S.C Willis” in white text. In the middle of the graphic, there is a quote from the story that reads: “She thinks I am speaking in hyperbole, but I’ve done it. Mother taught me there’s no such thing as someone loving you, only someone loving what you can do for them. Which put me in a predicament when I fell to Earth, cursed to walk around in mortal form unless I could procure true love’s kiss” in brown text. Underneath it reads: “Tales & Feathers Magazine — Volume 4” in white text. At the bottom is the link to the story: https://augursociety.org/i-will-bring-you-tokyo/
We’re kicking off our story releases from T&F Volume 4 with…
“I Will Bring You Tokyo” by @pscwillis.bsky.social!
An intimate story of a once-celestial being, cursed to live on Earth, navigating love and true love’s kiss. 💖🌍
Read it now! 🔗 Link in bio.
Golden light through my eyelids. It can't be morning yet! Can it? Eyes open. It's not the sun, it's to my left, the west. A golden glowing globe, nestled in broken shell fragments throws light. The right is painted silver. A full moon lies in the shell bits there. Between them? A rainbow arches!
I expected more noise - a rustling in the nest, cracking eggshells followed by some sort of high-pitched chorus from the creatures within - but there was nothing. I turned to get my coffee from the side table, and, when I turned back not two seconds later, three tiny wyrms lay huddled in the nest.
The first two eggs hold a pheasant and a robin, but the third—
“Avis ignifera,” you breathe, leaning as close as you dare to the baby bird whose scraggly feathers are seemingly made of flames. “The Common Firebird.”
It lets out a soft peep and your heart melts.
There's a bell -- glass, so the hatchlings aren't frightened -- rigged to ring and wake a watcher, in case they fell asleep overnight. But it's been ringing for a while when I muzzily open my eyes, yelp, and clamp them shut again.
Did I -- are my eyes -- no, we're okay. Three baby basilisks!
Three eggs nestle in the incubator. One yellow, one blue, one the shifting hues of sunset over ocean. No one knows when they'll hatch. No one knows what to expect when they do. But you're the one on overnight shifts. Who greets you, in the wee hours before sunrise?
#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt
I used to love the kitchen, snacks tumbling from cupboards just as I got peckish.
I used to love the attic stuffed with bookshelves--the closest thing I'd found to the inside of my own head.
I loved it all, right to the day the house stood up & walked away.
Hope she's happy, somewhere out there.
The thing about Houses is they get lonely too.
She's only been awake a few years now. The beams and banisters and gargoyles are old, but House? She still shies away from thunderstorms.
The window seat always has a book waiting for me. Sunset stories, we say, since neither of us ever go to bed.