Tacos

It all started at lunch today, when my hand caught the edge of my taco plate. Spicy meat juice splattered all over me, to the great amusement of witnesses. I smell like tacos now. No big deal, right? Yeah, well, I wasn’t counting on the rats. Apparently they have a thing for tacos. I’m not sure if they want to mate with them or eat them, but they’ve been following me all day. Skittering and squeaks behind my back, but as soon as I turn, they’re gone. Oh God. Is that a...NO! It’s a Rodent of Unusual Size! RUN!

With a Flapping of Wings

I can feel it here, inside, under my skin. It begins just beneath the muscles in my back, goose-flesh rippling against the bones. There’s a writhing along my vertebrae. Maggots. Terror solidifies there, trying to build, making my body an ill fit. It is trying to break through, but hasn't yet. I fight it. The sensation grows; I try to convince myself that it's just a feeling, crawling along the nerves of my spine like a repressed shudder between my shoulder blades. Phantom wings trapped beneath my skin, twitching and pulling. My skin crawls as I begin to doubt that this is just in my head. There is really something there, hiding along my bones and inside my muscles and my nerves. It spreads its arms and wings and legs and stretches luxuriantly. I feel something wrapping around my ribcage and creaking against my sternum. My stomach clenches and I want to vomit but do not feel nauseous. My heart can't decide whether to pound or to flutter. Tears prick my eyes and I cry out at the intensity of the horrid itching that has replaced the goose-flesh ripples inside. I feel the slithering of some plurality of limbs moving along my torso and my arms and legs, buds pushing out from the sides of my body, not yet bursting through.  The skin on my back stretches with painful sharpness and I experience a burning like childbirth as my back opens up.  My fingers seize and I watch in horrified awe as something sharp and black begins to protrude from each fingertip. The flesh rends and peels back, revealing scaly claws where smooth skin once lay. The scales seem to absorb light, yet they reflect, like oil, a diseased rainbow. Black. I feel new, supernumerary arms emerging from their buds on my sides, tearing through, flexing and seeking freedom from their cage of meat. The flesh of my face begins to stretch with the same sharpness as my spine. I feel sharp ridges emerge, splitting my skin, finally shedding my former flesh like a husk. I stretch my maw in an experimental yawn and tap my newly emerged talons against the ground, then leap skyward with a tremendous whoosh of my leathery wings. 



With a Flapping of Wings by Tena Kolakowski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Fall Cookies!

I made these cookies this weekend, partly because I wanted to (ok, mostly because I wanted to, since I got some awesome new fall cookie cutters at Target in the cheapo bins. $2.50 for 6 cookie cutters? Yes please!) and partly because we had a family birthday party today, and I knew that everyone would like some cookies.

I am very proud of these. I am especially loving the owls, they were so much fun to make!. Also, they are SUPER yummy and super chocolatey.

The recipe for the cookies can be found at LilaLoa's blog, it's the End-All for Chocolate Cookies.The dough is almost satiny, it's probably my favorite cookie dough that I've ever used to make cutouts.

No soup for you!

Darn, rejected again. I need to find some more flash fiction markets.

Submitted "With a Flapping of Wings" to The Molotov Cocktail.

Currently editing "Numb" for sending around to some new places.

Goal: At minimum, 2 new rejections. At best, an acceptance, someday. :-) No, I am not being pessimistic!

I find this terribly funny.

I may be alone in that. But really, if you have kids, you should take advantage of their toys when you can. I think the Ancestors enjoyed their "snack" before 3 of them got packed into boxes to be sent to their owners.

I don't just write. I am multi-talented. And modest.

Okay, so apparently I never posted this here. When I first read Ancestor by Scott Sigler (the new version) my son was 2 and I decided it would be fun to make him one of these:

I actually made one for Scott Sigler too :-)

If you want one, you can get one! They are now available at our Etsy shop: Music, Memories and More. It did take me a long ass time to actually get them up there, but there they are!


My review of Ancestor can be found here. I highly recommend it. I actually think it's about time I re-read it.
Now that I'm thinking about it, how fun would it be to make some Triangles? I'll have to do some serious thought on those though, I'm not sure how I'd make them. I could have a whole Sigler menagerie.