Story Time, Volume 34
This week's @DailyMicroFiction twitter stories, plus a bonus story at the end!
The Gorgon's curse left her with snakes for hair - and a gaze that would paralyze any who dared meet her eyes.
It sucked for a bit, but things have been improving recently - she moved to NYC a few years ago.
In Times Square, she almost feels normal again.
On the hospital tray in front of him sit two vials - on the left is morphine, for the pain. On the right, his chemotherapy drugs.
"When you're losing badly, it's polite to surrender," he remembers his chess teacher telling him.
He'd always been a poor loser.
Fifteen minutes after taking the anxiety pill, he felt it come over him like a great outrushing, an ocean’s recession preceding a tsunami, his worries receding from his consciousness and fading with a murmur into the recesses of his bequieted mind.
Wunderkind.
Aneurysm.
Disappointingly above average.
He walked the length of the temple, past pillar after pillar - some of stone, a few of wood, and even one of what looked like...sand?
"What keeps it upright?" he asked his guide, marveling. The guide traced a sigil into the soft-compacted silica.
"Duty."
A trail is a series of choices - go around this tree, over this river, along this ravine. Out of myriad potential paths, humanity coalesced into a single two-foot-wide promenade.
What if I go this way instead?
The sun slides through lunar twilight and turns the dust kicked up by my lander's exhaust an ombré patina of golden darkness.
As the sky darkens, I hoist my shovel and begin to break ground.
These craters didn't dig themselves, after all.
The android handed the knight a spear. On the other side of the portcullis, the battering ram continued to boom.
"Be brave," it told him.
"Easy for you to say," he replied. "You can't disobey your code."
"Nor can you."
They were the particle detectives: The Charmer and the Stranger, they were called.
For several femtoseconds they'd tracked a rogue Gluon. This case was serious - they'd been authorized a rare Strong Force warrant.
This massless particle wasn't getting off lightly.
There's a dusting of white powder on your marble countertop. Joey's traced his initials with his finger - his handwriting is terrible, is that supposed to be an "A"?
You wash it away, consigning the temporary graffiti to oblivion.
You make a note to get Joey a tutor.
"Let's try a word association game. A nail is to a hammer as a screw is to what?"
She didn't stop to think.
"Derek."
The therapist chuckled. "I was looking for 'screwdriver'".
"Screw Derek's driver too," she said.
"They're both douchebags."
What came first: the animal proverb, or the ability to tell time?
A whirling maelstrom of ice pulverized fine as Saharan sand surrounded her. Those eyes blazed a brilliant blue, somehow even colder than her aura; her bare arms showed goosebumps. Perhaps a rare sign of her humanity?
As I watched, they faded.
I began to shiver.
Mechanical fliez buzz softly in every background, nowadays.
Every night, the child prayed for guidance. He was nearing the age of Choice, and yet he still was unsure about which path was right for him.
On that fateful day, he walked to up the altar, still unsure. Before him were two cords: one USB-C, one Lightning.
He reached out his hand towards them, hoping for last-second guidance.
Neither fit. The crowd behind him gasped.
The preacher, stunned, turned over the child's hand. There, between the third and fourth fingers, was something thought lost to the ages: a MicroUSB port.