a better home awaiting - original short story

tags: gen. slipstream/fantasy. Appalachia, sisters, witches, sister-witches, hauntings, ghosts in the attic (or actually I guess the meadow behind the house if you wanna get specific), dowsing for water (in a God-honoring way), generational trauma, post-apocalyptic home repair

summary: the world ended a while back, and there’s nothing more that can be done about it, or so you might think if you believe everything you read in the Post. up in the hills, though - that’s a different story. there’s still plenty of shit left to fix, and Stacey Wheeler and her kid sister Harper are doing their damn best to fix it before it fixes them. 8k.

Do you enjoy folk magic, houses that want to eat people, emotionally fraught sibling bonding, and post-apocalyptic ghost stories? Then boy oh boy are you in luck! Check out my short story, “A Better Home Awaiting”, coming out January 1, 2023 in Volume 4 of @oficmag! (x) You can get a digital copy or, joy of joys, a physical copy!

I had an absolute blast writing this and polishing it up with the OFIC Mag crew, and I am thrilled to be sharing it with you!

It’s here!! Check it out!

as much as i love seeing orcas launching what appears to be intentional coordinated attacks on human ships it also makes me very sad because if it starts to become a genuine problem or even an extremely minor disruption to business people are going to just start killing them and i don't know that the orcas really understand the power differential they're dealing with here. that is why i am starting an organization whose mission will be to establish communication with the orca populace and provide them with equipment and training in order to level the playing field and empower them to take control of the seas, with the potential to open up trade and diplomatic relations on their own terms

i like to entertain myself by thinking about Bad Succession -> (alternate reality succession where it sucks). constant sepia-tinted flashbacks to traumatic childhood memories, with echoey abusive dad dialogue. post-car accident kendall is haunted by a hallucination of the waiter everywhere he goes. shiv has girlboss moments where she triumphs against misogynistic men and they learn not to underestimate women. once you get started you can’t stop.. the ideas are endless. they would try to make kendall into a rebellious bad boy type with personal demons. he would have a scene where he stares into a cracked mirror to represent his fractured psyche

Tumblr should appreciate Two Crabs by Vincent Van Gogh more

It's two crabs, whats not to love

today at goodwill i found a kirk/spock au where kirk is a lowly redshirt

Okay no but this book.

Do you know how fucking long I hunted for a copy of the first edition of this book? I can’t remember the specifics, it’s been ages since I read it, but in the first edition it had some line that was basically confirming Kirk/Spock that was removed after the first printing.

oh my god are you telling me i found a piece of fandom history and i had no idea

I AM BACK AT GOODWILL AND IT’S STILL HERE AND IT’S A FIRST EDITION WITH GAY STUFF???? IT’S A DOLLAR?????? I’M

it starts out with wholesome hand-holding and boyfriends worrying about each other

they’re in an au now and kirk is an angry ensign with a drug problem

“being the top felt weird and wrong”

SOMETHING STIRRED INSIDE HIM

no matter the universe kirk can’t keep his shirt intact

THIS IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL Y’ALL I CAN’T

THE MIND MELD IS BARELY EVEN A METAPHOR

KIRK WAS ASKING FOR IT

aaaaaaaaaaah

this is the best dollar i have ever spent and yes that includes bearllionaire

star trek heritage post (June 20th, 2017)

woman hand hook car door

#feminism

so the Spouse and I like to have a lot of verbal discussions about the universe where the asteroid didn't hit. mainly spec evo stuff. what would evolve into what, that kind of thing. we know we're not alone in that.

we maintain that humans evolved alongside some pretty terrifying mammalian megafauna, so why not dinosaurian? so what would a realistic sapient ape in a dinosaur world be?

it's taken some thinking, but:

wookies.

we'd be wookies.

Here's a thing to consider. It is highly likely that we would not exist without elephants.

There is strong evidence and a growing belief that our ancestors specifically used the trails that were laid down by elephant ancestors, and that's what allowed us to come down from the trees permanently and become bipedal.

Let's take humans off the table, and go with "us." I agree that with dinosaurs on the table, we would not be human. The events and multiple key species that allowed us to evolve as humans would not have happened.

And it was the KT Extinction event that allowed mammals to climb up and become more diverse than rodent and possum like creatures.

Now the question is, would simian-like creatures still evolve, with dinosaurs? It's probable, because it's not a huge anatomical leap to get from a possum to a monkey. And I could see simians being very successful in a dinosaur world, and even out competing some raptors occupying similar niches.

Now, going back to elephants, ceratopsians and hadrosaurs occupied similar niches to elephants, and were similar in size. They would have blazed the same trails that our ancestors used to come down from the trees.

And I don't think the dinosaurs would be inherently more dangerous than the megafauna our ancestors faced. The giant theropods would likely prefer to take larger creatures than us. Medium to small theropods would prey on us, but hell... So did lions and tigers and short-faced bears. So did wolves. And we survived that.

It would be in our advantage to stay small, make weapons, and burrow. We wouldn't be bigfoot wookies, we'd be Hobbits.

I completely agree with all of this and I think it's a coin flip whether we'd get tree dwelling wookies (because the predators were just Too Much to come down) or hobbits (because your scenario)

wait

wait

wait

BOTH EVOLVE

two sapient ape species

hobbits and wookies

and they'd be so different and deeply diverged we wouldn't have a neanderthal-hybrid-mixing situation....

just imagine a hobbit-wookie hybrid though

…i regret to inform you that you’ve just reinvented the ewok.

wait no

Well, there's a big assumption made here that the dinosaurs would continue in a similar form without that asteroid. But the thing is, non-avian dinosaurs were already in decline when that happened. So it's a very real question whether they would've survived to the present day or just had a more drawn-out extinction. At the very least, we'd probably be looking at a reduction in the number of non-avian dinosaur taxa

My guess is that the really big ones would not have survived. Mesozoic Earth seems to have been more suitable for giant animals than more recent history, so we'd probably be looking at small to medium-sized dinosaurs surviving. Maybe some elephant-sized dinosaurs, but none of the massive Titanosaurs and the like. Ultimately, I suspect any surviving dinosaurs would mostly compete with mammals and flightless birds for similar ecological niches

Nonavians weren’t in decline when the asteroid hit. That’s been debunked by multiple recent papers.

Praying to the american flag in a non-denominational protestant strip mall church to remove all negative status effects

Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

The sheer energy. The beauty of this woman. The women hugging in the background. The man in rainbow parachute pants. This whole video is art.

XXI. The World

If you're a decade or so younger than me and don't remember a time without GPS directions everywhere and maps on your phone, and you've ever wondered "How did they used to find places?", I'm here to tell you: We didn't. We got lost. A lot. When you went somewhere new, it was polite to factor the time you'd inevitably spend lost into your schedule getting there. You wrote down the directions on a piece of paper, hoped you could remember what the big tree next to the Family Dollar was supposed to look like, and put your fate in God's hands. It sucked so bad. I'm like a kooky survivalist who does map-and-compass land navigation stuff for fun and it sucked so bad.

mercymorn sketch

“A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That’s why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to heaven, or the other place, Boca Raton. If you dig up a clump when no one is nearby and there is no danger of being shot, you’ll find that there are scores of little bulbs in each clump, the progeny of a dozen or so planted by the farmer’s wife in 1942. If you take these home, separate them, and plant them in your own yard, within a couple of years, you’ll have a hundred daffodils for the mere price of a trespassing fine or imprisonment or both. I had this adventure once, and I consider it one of the great cheap thrills of my gardening career. I am not advocating trespassing, especially on my property, but there is no law against having a shovel in the trunk of your car.” 

― Cassandra Danz, Mrs. Greenthumbs: How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too

I clicked the link because I enjoyed this quote and was not disappointed

do the animals we track, study and observe with almost a religious fervor know how important they become? Does White Gladys understand how central she and her personal grudge against yachts are to the mythology of recent attacks? Could Grizzly 399 ever understand that our species makes manifestly dumb videos celebrating how canny she's been in raising her young? Chicago has rolled out the red carpet for its piping plovers, its rogue alligators, snapping turtles, and park foxes, like they're renting space in the Water Tower for a premium, and it makes me wonder if on some level they know. they know.

saw a christofascist die today: effervescent