Wednesday Serial: Farther Part CXIII

ANIE

In the twilight, Lord Tiernan’s camp moved languidly. The neatness of the tent lines gently hedged in the growing shadows from cook fires and torches. Canvas rustled, flaps opening and closing. Charcoal smoke drifted lazily. Ahead of Anie, one of the soldiers leading them encouraged them to keep moving, but her tone was unhurried. The whole crowd of them leaned lightly into their steps, looking around, talking quietly. Anie watched the men and women drifting between their tents, breathed in deep to catch the warmth of venison and broth boiling for supper.

And Momma leaned over one of the cookpots, long hair tied back with a single string, falling over one shoulder.

Anie stopped just where she was.

Wednesday Serial: Farther Part CXII

ANIE

The birds started singing in the trees about the time that Anie had to start watching her feet while she walked. She lost her energy in the space of a yawn, and the growing light spreading through the sky on her right seemed wrong. She blinked heavily. Thea slowed, holding steadier, as Anie started to stumble. The others all pulled in a little closer, as if they might lean against each other.

The sun climbed heedlessly into the sky.

“When do we sleep?” Anie murmured.

“It’s not safe yet,” Chas said. But he was slowing too. The whole crowd ahead of them seemed to be stuttering in their steps. The trees were thinning, the ground evening out, but their feet seemed more and more hesitant to leave the ground.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Not Alone (761 words)

Rain drowned the world in white noise. Sarah would have preferred snow, to muffle the world into a tensionless silence, but it didn’t snow here. Rain was rare enough. She listened to it tap against the window, hum on the roof, and decided to be grateful for the way it barred her from everything outside her living room walls.

From everyone.

She didn’t have an easy time keeping herself away from others; she invited them into every moment. Her phone was always in her hands. Her car was always gassed up. She left work, exhausted, and took her rest in a shared drink and a long, loud conversation. Alone was never a state she wanted to settle into, but she knew she needed it just now. It didn’t matter how quick she had trained herself to be, how easy she had made it to keep her own mind sitting right next to another opinion.

She was uncertain now, and she needed the quiet.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Does Your Mother Know What You’re Doing? (691 words)

When mountain ranges cut across the horizon before and behind her, and the blue Toyota still hovered in her rearview mirror, Terrin’s better judgement gave way to curiosity. She tapped the break lightly. The car seemed to hesitate, just a moment, as cruise control disengaged, and then she eased the car into a speed that might be described as grandmotherly. At least to other people. Her own grandmother collected speeding tickets like fine china and had recently begun wall-papering the dining room with them.

Dalia looked up as the car decelerated, glanced at Terrin, then the side mirror, and shook her head. “Don’t do it,” she said.

Terrin took her eyes off the road for half a second to purposefully give her an innocent look. “It’s not illegal to go under the speed limit.”

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Older Games (906 words)

She lit the flare, and fire danced off the carved dome of the temple. She stared, gun still raised, smoke curling off the barrel into the ice-sharp night air. Stone was not supposed to catch fire quite like that.

But it was burning merrily.

It took Traesa a moment to recover. She wasn’t supposed to stay on this roof after she set off the flare. One obvious shot, visible to nearly anyone in the sloping, sprawling city, and she was meant to scurry down, before anyone in a uniform could trace it the shot back to her. Now that the temple was crawling with fire, she feared the priests coming for her as well. And she hated their lectures worst of all.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Retribution (435 words)

Alex did not consider himself a particularly panicky person.

Honestly, he was the kind of person who drove his gas tank down to fumes, and ate pork after the sell-by date on a regular basis. He took police sirens behind him in stride because, yeah, he had been speeding. He woke up late and still ate a full breakfast. He heard strange noises outside his window at night and assumed it was a stray cat before burglars or ghosts even crossed his mind. He understood that when his mother called him three times in the space of an hour, she probably was not calling to tell him about a funeral. He was, he thought, very close to unflappable.

But he still froze when the bathroom door squeaked open while he was in the middle of his shower. The water continued streaming down from the showerhead, noisy, and almost instantly unwelcome as he heard one sharp footstep on the tile, and a few muffled ones on the bathroom rug.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Echoes (524 words)

It was getting irritating, listening to well-meaning statements about what was and was not possible. Lowri read it in Braelyn’s face while her little ring of advisor’s alternately offered their advice and slapped it into the dim, echoing hall. She listened to all of it in the same diplomatic silence, hands folded, back elegantly straight. But one corner of her mouth was tilting up, moment by moment, sharpening a crooked smile that Lowri loved and hated.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Distract Me (513 words)

The knife slipped, cutting through the apple and hard into her palm. For a moment, it didn’t hurt, in that magic way of sharp knives and tender skin. Her gasp was all surprise. The two uneven halves of the apple fell to the floor. One slapped on the kitchen tile and the other bounced. Daniel leaned around the doorway curiously.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Long Day (654 words)

He capered across the wall, and those rising to start their tasks looked away from him. He cracked a grin at the back of their heads. It always pleased Omri immensely to watch his little magicks work on them. Dressed in a bright yellow coat that caught the sun and made it jealous, in blue and purple pants, in boots almost too white to exist, they were still compelled not to notice. It was freedom in every magnitude, and Omri loved it.

He landed on the ground with a thud that should have halted their work, and they ignored him. He sauntered across the manor’s overgrown lawn, pants and long grass hissing and hushing. He whistled a little. No one cared, but when he passed just behind a boy bent double to rip weeds from the edge of the path, there was a small shudder in the boy’s spine.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Rush (974 words)

Once, when Karleigh was younger, a boy had climbed the elegant façade of her uncle’s house to tap on her bedroom window. It had been a deeply moonlit night, so she had caught his shadow across the glass before he knocked for her, and his hair had a silver sheen like something precious, and her stomach had gotten butterflies just from the storybook timing.

A year later, she realized it wasn’t romance in the stories. It was just practicality. Dashing young men who tried to climb on darker nights, probably fell and broke their backs. Even if the pretty girl was only on the second story.