Title: Rooftop
Challenge/Prompt: #16: Rain
Original Fiction
Rating: G
Summary: A lady of breeding at wits' end turns to the only ones who cannot help but listen.
Author's Notes: Another bit from my same unnamed setting. Different character, different part of the same schizophrenic city.


The storm rolled in down the valley and Yessa waited on the rooftop of her townhouse, the ancient gravel biting into her knees as she prostrated herself. She cupped the glass offering bowl in her outstretched hands, whispering her mantra over and over: “Blessed Mara of the rain, heed thee now to my heart's pain.” Again, again, until she lost the words and held only to the rhythm, echoing in her mind and in her heart.

When the first droplets finally fell, tears were already flowing, and the prayer became an outright plea: “Mara, Lady, help me find my son.”

Title: Fall
Challenge/Prompt: Fall
Original Fiction
Rating: PG
Warnings: Disturbing mental imagery
Summary: The plague crept in on little rat feet...
Author's Notes: It has a formatting structure that lends itself to the effect. Does that make it poetry? I don't know. It's a drabble, anyway. Old idea (in several ways) rehashed.

It all started with the rats, or maybe the fleas, like that other plague centuries ago. Rats get everywhere, crawling through our basements, stores, cars. No one expected that it would be transmitted species-to-species because we trusted the stories. The plague crept in on little rat feet and down went our cats and dogs and our children and us,
in one of those great exponential cascades, falling like lurching dominoes
leaving we few: the lucky, the quick, the immune, the prepared.
Times are tougher than we ever imagined,
just we and the zombies
on the dying earth
alone.