Tic-Tac-Toe

[GRAPHIC ZOMBIE WARNING! If you don't like zombies, don't whimper, I'll give you something livelier next week.]

I scratched at a flake of skin that was peeling off my calf. I'd last a lot longer if I didn't scratch but by this point, it really didn't matter. And Jeck wasn't watching. He was lying on his back in the long sunray that had miraculously bled through the brown fog. The sun made even the dust look pretty.

But not my friend.

He was a worse scratcher than I, and he'd taken to eating his flakes to ease the hunger, like paper mints before the world blew. I caught his flicker of pain each time I crumbled one in my fingers and watched it blow away in the wind. I could offer him mine, but that was against our rules.

But our rules hadn't helped us much. Whole chunks of cheek had fallen off my face like hard marbles, and Jeck was mostly corroding muscle. He didn't even have eyelids.

The nice thing about this disease was that it left your mind dull, so you didn't think about things too much. In this landscape, there was nothing left to really think about, anyway.

"You trying to embalm yourself?" I asked my friend. His eyes rolled to mine.

"The sun feels good. Like it'll clean me out if I get hot enough."

I almost said he'd make some good jerky but thought better of it. The hunger didn't bother me as much, I'd felt hollow for long enough it didn't matter.

Everyone else had eaten each other but Jeck and I refused and escaped. Maybe that's why we rotted so slowly, because we'd never injested anyone else's bacteria. Who knew? Here we were, the last two humans in Arizona and even the bacteria, it seemed, were dead.

"Come play tic-tac-toe," I said.

He said nothing and I sighed, done with the whole drama. We were the longest, boring-est performance on the after-life of the planet. Carefully, I pulled off a toe. The place it'd hung throbbed with a dull and nagging ache. I shrugged. I tossed the toe onto Jeck's chest.

He caught it and rolled his eyes back up to me. "What the crap, Mutt?"

"We're playing with real toes. Let's have some fun."

I wasn't sure how many limbs I'd have to lose to get out of here, but if it made my buddy a little happier in the end, then it made me happier, too. I drew the cross in the sand.

Little Puff Big Puff

In the great black pupil, I could see my reflection and Bee's, fastened with our belts to the back seat of the stranger's car. The pupil was ringed by a brilliant red iris, and beyond that a soft white skin, and I longed to reach out and stroke the layers of fluffy, perfect feathers that surrounded it, to see how soft they were now that they were big. But I knew if I did that my arm would be gone in a snap, quite literally, and I held perfectly still, not daring to breathe Puff's name.

Bee sighed in his sleep and the pupil disappeared. The gigantic black beak slammed into the roof of the car, puncturing the metal, and I screamed. It formed a jagged reef between Bee and I, and I knew I could touch the hard ebony of the beak's end if I dared. Instead, I clung for dear life to my seatbelt as our hiding place was lifted high into the air. We began to shake in a rhythmic, lilting pattern, and foliage rushed past our windows.

Bee cried out and I reached my hand around the beak and found his. "Hang on tight. He's taking us to his nest."

"Will we become food for his babies?" he hiccuped.

"We'll see," I said. "It depends on if he remembers us."

That wasn't much of a hope.

Puff used to be our pet. Before the volcano blew and all the Carbon dioxide got trapped under the atmosphere, people had lots of pets. Dad thought it was a trick of the government plotted at the same time, and my best friend's mum thought it was an attempt by scientists to save life on the planet, that triggered plants and animals to grow so quickly. It hadn't taken many years for the quick-breeding animals to become giants. Bugs, then birds, then who knew what was coming next.

Puff started out small and helpless, and Dad let us keep him for a bit, but he grew so fast that by the next week he wouldn't fit inside the house. Dad was afraid he'd mistake us for bugs--the smaller kinds, so we let him out with the rest of nature gone wild, and then we did our best to hide.

I wasn't sure what I believed out of all of it, but it didn't really matter anyway, especially after Dad disappeared while trying to find us food.

Bee and I went out to search for him the next week because we were hungry. We snuck car to car in the dark, hoping a bat or rat wouldn't swoop down and grab us. But daytime was more dangerous, even, which is why we were sleeping inside the hot, bright vehicle. I was glad I'd made us buckle.

Not much longer, our car was dropped and I whuffed as the seat belt caught at my chest with full gravity. Bee whimpered and I hoped he was all right. When nothing more happened, I quietly unclipped the seatbelt and clambered around the metal rift to unclip Bee's. There was a chance, if we were quick, that we could escape before Puff came back.

"Let's go," I whispered to Bee. "Out this window. Let's see if we can hide."

White-faced, he nodded and followed me over the glass shards into the shadow of a very large rock, and then we held our breath, waiting. I wrapped my arm around Bee, who tucked his face into my shirt.

A voice swept all of our caution to the wind. "Dandy! Bee!" it called.

"Dad!" I screamed, and raced around the rock into his arms.

"Oh Dandy, Bee. I was so scared for you. Are you two all right?"

I nodded and after he checked us all over to be sure, he said, "Come into the cave. I can't believe it. Puff found you."

"He seemed to have," I said, shivering as we pulled into the shadowy crevice. I wrinkled my nose at the bug legs strewn across the ground.

"Watch your step. After they dry, I'm going to take those and weave them into a barrier for the front door," Dad said. "Puff snapped up the apple I was harvesting from and brought me here. I tried to sneak off four times but he found me each time and brought me back. Finally, I yelled at him and told him I was trying to find you. And then he did," he smiled. "He recognizes us, my loves."

"And now," he said, "I believe we're his pets."

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This story was inspired both by Suzanne Warr's prompt "the car-trip of a lifetime" and by my own birds. I have four of them, two sun conures and two caiques, and their fluffy, know-better attitudes inspire all sorts of soap operas. Just to show you what they're like, here are pics. The first one is Ari, our white belly caique. The second is Phoenix, a male sun conure. And the last has Storm, our black-headed caique up on my head, Phoenix again on the right, and Angel, our female sun peering at him. No, we're not encouraging babies, and they live for a very long time, at least thirty years!

If the tides were turned, what pet would you pick to take care of you?

End With Me (Love Song Part 8)

Eventually, I turned my face toward Jared. He hadn't moved, but it looked like shadows had eaten his soul.

"All right, Mr. Hippo," I smiled toward him. "Do your thing. And then, you'll give me five minutes with the delinquent, here."

Jared stared at me, confusion written across his face. "I'm not sure," he said slowly, "if I understand what just happened."

I looked askance at him. "You need me to explain to you your own love song?"

He spread his hands.

"You sang the challenge to me. Mark was just a distraction." I looked down at his mangled body, feeling despicable. "He always was. And he got into the middle of something much bigger than he should have. But I wasn't strong enough to walk away. I'd clung to him for a long time, and he's a good person."

"You wouldn't choose anyone less," Jared said.

"The song woke me up. But since I wouldn't listen to myself, I had to listen to the roses." I smiled sadly. "The challenge used them to make me see the truth about myself."

"Not the truth about me?" Jared asked, trying to chuckle.

"In order to see the truth in anyone else, you have to see it in yourself, first," I said softly. "Your haiku about the rose petals was when I knew, but I still didn't believe. Not even with the roses. The souls, they had to tell me."

"You must believe."

I nodded. "When I closed my mind to your miracles, I blinded myself to all of them. I saw only the pain. But my mom got better. My cat had five extra years. And Mark..." I gazed down at him and didn't know how I could ever make up for this. "He gave me his sun."

"I'm happy that you're happy," Jared said carefully. His smile looked forced.

He crouched beside Mark, and placing his hand on his forehead, raised his brown eyes to mine. I smiled at him assuringly.

A furrow cinched his eyebrows, and I watched as Mark's body healed. The punctures grew pink, then white, then melted into his skin like they'd never appeared. His chest inhaled, and he groaned. And then his gray eyes blinked.

"Med?" he asked.

Jared's footsteps crunched away through the foliage.

"Hey, Sunshine," I said. "We have to get you cleaned up."

Mark rose to his elbows and the smile I loved so much crooked his face. But it looked pensive. "I didn't know you cared so little."

He always could see clearly.

My own smile faltered. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

He shook his head. "You warned me but I was so positive of my position. I didn't listen."

"I needed you," I said, desperate for him to understand.

"But you don't now."

How could I lie to someone I cared so much for? "I had to learn how to believe in miracles again," I said. "You were one, for me."

He stood up and gazed at his arms, the streaks of blood and dirt covering his skin and the holes riddling his clothing. Pain crossed his features as he remembered. "They felt like you," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said again, helplessly.

"I think, Medea, that you owe me." He walked past me without touching me, and stooped at Scat's stone. He picked up the posie and shredded it.

In the distance, Scat yowled.

I closed my eyes, and believed. Then I began to write a love song.

THE END

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I hope you enjoyed the story! If you didn't get a chance to read the whole thing, follow the links at the bottom. And leave comments! Tell me if you liked it, hated it, what you think will happen next between Jared, Med and Mark. Life never quite resolves how you think it will, providing more opportunities for further stories... and romance. :)

With special thanks to Suzanne Warr for providing her blog hop and inspiring the topic--you rock, girl.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 (today)

All Kisses (Love Song Part 7)

I basked in the sunlight that had come out and warmed everything.

"Med," Jared said quietly, after several moments.

"What?"

I opened my eyes and placed a hand over my mouth.

Mark wasn't better. He wasn't awake, either. Around us hovered people, at least twelve to the inner perimeter and beyond them others, their circles extending back into a blur of white energy, through which the trees appeared like dark pillars. Though their bodies were transparent, wearing clothes from many eras, their eyes pierced me, staring gravely in my direction.

One small body, furred and bright wove through the legs of a man and woman, and sat on Mark's chest.

"Scat," I said. In this bleached light, he appeared more real than Mark did.

His eyes blinked slowly as a soft tickle twined around my hands. It was difficult to pull my attention from the scene, but I obeyed the sensation and looked down. Around my fingers, small brambles appeared, green and pliable. They sprouted small round leaves with edges that gradually turned sharp. More sprouted around my knees, and as the stalks thickened and hardened into mature branches with thorns, buds formed and blossomed into fragrant petals.

"No," I whispered.

The petals fell.

"Medea," a whispering rustle said my name. The noise came from all around me, as soft as the blossoms, but I knew the voice was of all these people talking at once, as though it took great effort to speak through their veil.

"You must believe," they said.

They faded away. Except for Scat, whose tail flicked.

"Are you saying I did this?" I asked him.

Scat yawned, ears back and teeth exposed in the full grimace, and hopped to the earth. He circled Mark's head, stretched, then bunched up and skittered off into the forest.

The world around me spun. Not literally, like the trees, and not figuratively like the souls I'd somehow seen. But my mind, my memories, my intuition shifted as I gazed at the roses curling around my limbs.

They were my roses, not my mother's. And untouchable by Jared's winds no matter how persuasive he was. They were a symbol of my life, growing one way and another in crazy and sharp directions--the green shoots nourished by my parents but often lonely, their bark twisted by uncertainty and freckled by life's thorns... and never just happy.

Unless I was in Jared's sun.

But roses are tough, and when the shadows fell, I grew wood over my green branches and found Mark. Mark was my attempt to create sunlight after the sun had left... and I'd done it, after a fashion.

I reached deep into my earth and allowed the roses to unravel their hold on me, and crawled toward the boy on the ground. I ran my fingers over the wounds on his cheeks, down his neck, along his arms, grieved that he'd gone through this pain. Jared hadn't hurt him, I had. I'd trapped him here, even if I hadn't realized it, and trapped myself here until I pushed through the song's equation and knew.

Jared's challenge wasn't to Mark. It was to me. All winds, all desires, all forces, all knowledge, all souls--I'd seen.

I pulled the band from my hair and allowed it to fall in a river to hide my face, then leaned over and kissed the lips of the boy that I loved.

I'd taken his sun.

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One more week, coming up next Friday! Stay tuned :D.