She wanted so little..

TROUBLE

The cauldron didn’t boil or bubble the way Maggie had been assured by Shakespeare that it would. It just kinda fixed a little as she mixed in the eye of newt (poor newt! Never did anything to anyone!) and she wondered if this Old Magic would really do anything. She was quite fond of New Magic, and its preoccupation with candles and arts and crafts. She was comfortable with those things. She was GOOD at those things. She had NO idea why she was churning a cauldron in the woods in the dark. The things she did on a dare.

She'd done it on her own...

SWIMMING

The rocky and jagged coast opened into a hundred or so tiny estuaries that each lead to a fresh-water stream that could be traced to a forest, and past the forest, into the mountains. And so it had been easy for Sadie to follow such a long trail from her sisters in the sea, to the snowy edge of the rocky mountain. That was where she stopped and turned around, for the water had run out of depth, and she was drowning in the air. But she had done it—she’d gone further inland than any other Siren before her.

The cushions wanted more...

BIG SISTER

The sofa cushions were not fond of their lot in life. Accept what you are, the carpet told them. Just keep yourself to yourself, and don’t rock the boat, the wide screen TV harped, over and over. The worst was the ceiling fan, who would go on and on about everyone’s place in the world, and they all had this special and unique part to play in the “grand scheme of things.” The sofa cushions agreed that the fan should go stuff itself into the vacuum and die. They didn’t hate being cushions. They just hated babysitting the throw pillows.

He also didn't get along with the other bees...

ALLERGIES

Zander had a few problems. Firstly, he was a bee. That was kind of a bit of a problem, because he didn’t feel like a bee. He looked like a bee. He had the segmented exoskeleton of a bee. He had the wings of a bee. The crazy honey-making abilities of bees, and he felt inclined to serve the hive Queen, which was extremely bee-like. Even he had to admit that. But He just didn’t feel like a bee. He felt more like a man, trapped in a bee body. Also…he was allergic to pollen. It made him rather sneezy.

Even his horse was filled with dread...

THUNDER

There were no men with Grogan. He tended to travel lightly. This meant his horse, his sack, his sword…and no army. But as the air and earth thundered around him with the approach of an uncountable number of hooves, he wished that he had not been so stubborn; that he had allowed his brother to talk him into taking at least a lance with him. He also said a brief prayer to the goddess that his ears were deceiving him. Perhaps it was an impending summer storm that rumbled his very core. But frivolous prayers like that were never answered.

As she watched, things changed...

SOCIOLOGY

“We don’t have time for this,” Wosut said, gently grasping Ponill’s shoulder and attempting to surreptitiously redirect her back to the reading room, and her studies.

With a tiny shrug, she removed herself from her teacher’s grasp and continued staring out the window, across the fresh-shorn, peaceful lawn, to the unrest beyond the castle walls. Women, men, children and castle guards, taunting that turned to yelling which turned to throwing things, which ended with a knight’s dagger protruding from the blacksmith’s head, and said knight on fire, burning a live in his armor. “No. I think I should see this.”

They sang of how things were...

BALLAD

The stars saw

The stars remembered.

They sang of times

Gone and past.

Of the things that only

Far-away stars can see

They sang in hushed choir

So only a few could hear

Their song of dragons

And minotaurs

Poisonous monsters

And men with spears.

They sang of skies

Purple and gold

As the sun set

On the bloody sand

The stars watched

Souls of better men

Sink between each grain

Until washed by

The foamy tide

And absolved

By the women of the sea.

They wrote the story

As a lonely ballad

In their dark night,

Stretched across infinity.

So many errors made...

RESPONSIBILITY

The error had been mine, of course. That was just how things happened, whether the error was actually mine or not. Culpability tended to run downhill... similar to avelanches or excrement. Still, even though the calculations had not actually been my doing, I should have had the forsight to double possibly and triple check the captain's course, knowing as I did about bodily waste and hills, even in space.

If the calculations were not my fault, the lack of ass-covering, given the nature of my job, was. So, in that sense, I DID fire the shot that ddestroyed the Earth.

She loved the nature channel...

DOCUMENTARY

“This lonely creature spends each day seeking only comfort from another of its kind. But in the vast, stony wasteland, he finds none. Our cameras captured this one…”

“Oh come on. That’s completely staged. That doesn’t even LOOK real. You can practically see the zipper on that thing…”

Illa poked her brother. “Shut up. I am watching this documentary.”

“It’s not a documentary. It’s a fairy tale. Told to idiots too stupid to know there’s no such thing as humans.”

Illa paused the holo display. “Look, that’s a human! Right here! You’re going to tell me it isn’t real?”

“Yes.”

They both also ate shoes...

FOSTER-DRAGON

House training an eight week old dragon was a lot like house training a puppy, in a lot of ways. First, they were prone to chewing on wires and home entertainment center cables, next was their penchant for waiting until you were at a really good part of the TV show when they would inevitably have to go outside for a potty break. Sure, they were scaly and could fly (sorta—Mortimer was still working on it) but really it was very similar, training and trouble-wise. And at midght cuddle time. And treats time. But not the fire breathing part.